Canadian scholar Erin C. MacLeod has written a thorough interdisciplinary analysis of Rastafari, the colourful, if very small in number, group of ferengis, mostly from Jamaica, who comprise an anomaly in present day Ethiopia. MacLeod knows her subject well having worked on this study from 2004 through 2013. Before pursuing intensive fieldwork between 2007 and 2008, she established her bona fides with the people she later would interview by living and working in the midst of Rastafari and their Ethiopian neighbours in Shashemene, central Ethiopia. MacLeod, at different times, worked for Habitat for Humanity, taught in a local college, and volunteered as a kindergarten teacher in a NGO school. She interviewed some 90 Rastafari and Ethiopians representing a broad cross-section of society, mainly in Shashemene and also in Addis Ababa. In addition, she reviewed Ethiopian media coverage of Rastafari, academic and religious writing, pamphlet and tract literature, and music and artwork. Her goal was to discern how Rastafari view Ethiopia and its people and how Ethiopians interact with and perceive Rastafari. MacLeod's findings indicate that the two groups are on different wave-lengths. There is much room for better understanding of the other on the part of both groups.
MacLeod traces the history of Rastafari coming to Ethiopia not as immigrants but as, from their perspective, Ethiopians ‘returning home’. They chose to migrate not for economic reasons but due to their belief in the divinity of Emperor Haile Selassie and in Ethiopia as the Promised Land. The Rastafari viewed Ethiopia as the symbol of unity and solidarity and of anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism. They saw the land as a bastion of freedom, liberty, and justice and insisted that their culture was that of Ethiopia. For over fifty years, hundreds of Rastafari pilgrims and settlers have come to Ethiopia and particularly Shashemene as ‘heirs’ to an idealised land where they tried to translate their dream into reality.
Rastafari trace their origins to the first part of the 20th century when a combination of economic and political crises in Jamaica and the rise of Afrocentric movements as promoted by Marcus Garvey and his back to Africa philosophy led to the belief that the 1930 coronation of Emperor Haile Selassie was the fulfilment of Biblical prophecy and that Haile Selassie was the messiah of African redemption. Wrote Garvey: ‘Look to Africa for the crowning of a Black King; he shall be the redeemer.’ The timing of Haile Selassie's coronation was propitious, and Rastafari took Garvey's message to heart and derived their name from the Emperor's birth name, Tafari Makonnen Woldemikael. The Zion of Ethiopia was seen as the homeland of the Rastafari, where there was no hierarchy of people and where all were equal and unified.
As MacLeod notes, some of the sacred soil of Ethiopia became available to the Rastafari when Haile Selassie granted five gashas (around 500 acres) of land in Shashemene to ‘African people in the diaspora who desired to return to the motherland’. In the mid-1950s Rastafari began to arrive in Ethiopia, where they were welcomed by the Emperor and accepted into the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and the community of Shashemene. A stumbling block to their integration, however, was their firm belief in Haile Selassie's divinity. As MacLeod found in her interviews, later negative stereotypes of the Rastafari as an alien culture came from their dress, hair styles, and use of marijuana or ganja. ‘They live here but we don't know them’ was one Ethiopian's not-atypical evaluation of ‘the Jamaicans’, as Rastafari frequently are called by the habasha.
MacLeod's work is as much a study of immigration as it is about a diaspora returned home. The Rastafari land grant has never been parlayed into citizenship rights. It has not been for lack of trying on the part of the immigrants. Over the years, they have founded NGOs, started development initiatives, and opened hotels and businesses. They even acted as foreign investors and reached out to Western donors. Nevertheless, there is no official policy on Rastafari and citizenship in Ethiopia. Although their actions would appear to be a plus in the current government's developmental state, the Rastafari remain in a political limbo. In a population of over eighty million, the few hundred Rastafari frequently are overlooked.
MacLeod has shone a spotlight on this group in writing a definitive analysis of the Rastafari in their Ethiopian Zion.
