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News From Nowhere Radical & Community Bookshop

not-for-profit - a workers'co-op - committed to social justice | 96 Bold Street, Liverpool L1 4HY - 0151 708 7270

The First Rasta: Leonard Howell and the Rise of Rastafarianism

by Helene Lee and Stephen Davis - £14.99  Chicago Review Press (2005)
paperback    ISBN 13: 9781556525582 | ISBN 10: 1556525583

Going far beyond the standard imagery of Rasta - ganja, reggae, and dreadlocks - this cultural history offers an uncensored vision of a movement with complex roots and the exceptional journey of a man who taught an enslaved people how to be proud and impose their culture on the world.
 
In the 1920s Leonard Percival Howell and the First Rastas had a revelation concerning the divinity of Haile Selassie, king of Ethiopia, that established the vision for the most popular mystical movement of the 20th century, Rastafarianism.
 
Although jailed, ridiculed, and treated as insane, Howell, also known as the Gong, established a Rasta community of 4,500 members, the first agro-industrial enterprise devoted to producing marijuana. In the late 1950s the community was dispersed, disseminating Rasta teachings throughout the ghettos of the island. A young singer named Bob Marley adopted Howell's message, and through Marley's visions, reggae made its explosion in the music world.

(Price & availability last checked: August 2018)

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In booklists: Black, Asian and Middle Eastern Biography and Autobiography, Rastafarianism,
In categories: History & Biography, Black, Asian & Other Diasporas, Spirituality, World - Latin America & Caribbean,

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