In 1920, Marcus Mosiah Garvey stood before 25,000 people at Madison Square Garden in New York City and delivered an address that would echo through the next century of Pan-African thought, Caribbean liberation movements, and the spiritual tradition that became Rastafari. He spoke of Africa redeemed, of the Black nation rising, of a king yet to come from the African continent who would signal the hour of Africa’s redemption. The words were prophetic in the literal sense — a declaration about a future event that would serve as confirmation of a spiritual truth. Ten years later, Haile Selassie I was crowned Emperor of Ethiopia in a ceremony that the Rastafari movement in Jamaica interpreted as the fulfillment of exactly that prophecy.

The relationship between Garvey and Selassie, between the prophecy and its perceived fulfillment, between the Universal Negro Improvement Association and the emerging Rastafari movement, is one of the most consequential connections in the history of the African diaspora — and one of the most misunderstood. Garvey himself did not embrace Rastafari and was in fact critical of Selassie’s response to the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. The movement that grew from the intersection of Garvey’s prophecy and Selassie’s person was not one that Garvey directed or endorsed. And yet the connection between the two men is real, documented, and foundational to the most globally significant spiritual and cultural movement to emerge from Jamaica.

Marcus Garvey — The Prophet of African Redemption

Marcus Mosiah Garvey was born in St. Ann’s Bay, Jamaica, on August 17, 1887. He was the youngest of eleven children of Marcus Mosiah Garvey Sr. and Sarah Jane Richards. He left school at fourteen to work as a printer’s apprentice, traveled through Central America and England in his early twenties, and returned to Jamaica in 1914 to found the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League — the UNIA — which would become, by the early 1920s, the largest mass movement of Black people in world history.

The UNIA at its peak claimed four million members in forty countries. Its newspaper, the Negro World, had a circulation estimated at 200,000 and was banned in several British and French colonies because of its advocacy for African independence. Garvey’s 1920 Declaration of Rights of the Negro Peoples of the World, adopted at the UNIA’s first International Convention, is one of the foundational documents of Pan-African political thought — a comprehensive statement of the rights of African peoples to self-determination, to freedom from colonial rule, and to the full dignity of humanity.

Haile Selassie I — The King Who Was Crowned

Ras Tafari Makonnen was born on July 23, 1892, in Ejersa Goro, in the Harar region of Ethiopia. He was a great-nephew of Emperor Menelik II and rose through the Ethiopian court as a administrator, military commander and political leader of exceptional ability. He was appointed regent and heir presumptive to Empress Zewditu in 1916, and on November 2, 1930, following Zewditu’s death, he was crowned Emperor of Ethiopia as Haile Selassie I — Power of the Trinity — with the additional titles Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, King of Kings, and Elect of God.

The coronation was a global event. Delegations from across the world attended. Photographs and newsreels of the ceremony circulated internationally. In Jamaica, where the UNIA’s message had taken deep root in the working-class communities of Kingston and St. Andrew, the coronation was received by a growing community of believers as exactly what Garvey had prophesied: a Black king crowned in Africa, signaling the hour of African redemption. The Rastafari movement dates its founding to this event.

Rastafari — The Movement That Circled the Earth

The Rastafari movement that emerged from Jamaica in the 1930s is, fifty years after Bob Marley brought it to global consciousness, one of the most globally significant spiritual and cultural movements of the twentieth century. Its influence on music, on visual culture, on political thought, on the liberation movements of the Caribbean, Africa and the African diaspora is incalculable. The movement that began among the poor of Kingston has produced a body of music, poetry, philosophy and spiritual practice that has reached every continent and influenced every culture that has encountered it.

The connection between Garvey’s prophecy and Selassie’s coronation is the theological foundation of Rastafari. The movement’s assertion that Haile Selassie I is the returned Messiah — Jah Rastafari — is the central truth claim around which the entire Rastafari worldview is organized. The repatriation to Africa, the rejection of Babylon, the celebration of African heritage, the ital dietary practice, the reasoning sessions — all of these flow from the central theological claim that the prophecy was fulfilled and that the hour of African redemption is at hand.