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In the Light of Ras Tafari
“A strange new fish emits a blinding green light,” the article in National Geographic announced. Off the coast of Bermuda, an intrepid correspondent curled up inside a Bathysphere, a round steel chamber with a porthole, had been lowered by rope into depths where no man had gone before. His deep-sea observations, appearing in the June 1931 issue, were followed by the account of an even greater curiosity: the coronation of an African king. On November 2, 1930, Ras Tafari Makonnen had been crowned His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I, Emperor of Ethiopia, King of Kings, Elect of God, and Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, in a spectacular weeklong celebration in Addis Ababa. In sixty-eight pages of text and color photography, the magazine described how world leaders and monarchs, film crews, and chieftains in prickly lion-mane headdresses had converged from all directions on the landlocked Christian kingdom, the last uncolonized territory in Africa. From Great Britain came the Duke of Gloucester, King George V’s son, bearing a crown and scepter once stolen from the country as well as a traditional English coronation cake. From Italy came the Prince of Udine with the gift of an airplane; from America, President Herbert Hoover’s emissary came laden with an electric refrigerator, five hundred rosebushes, and a complete bound set of National Geographic.
“The studded doors of the Holy of Holies open ponderously,” recounted the diplomat Addison E. Southard, who served as United States consul general in Ethiopia and was reporting on the ceremony for the magazine. At dawn, the Conquering Lion and His Empress, Menen Asfaw, entered the throne room, aglow with a red-gold light. Forty-nine bishops in groups of seven had been reciting the Psalms for seven days and seven nights, stationed in the seven corners of the cathedral. The Ethiopian royal dynasty had remained unbroken, Southard noted, from the mistiest dawn of the past, “with time out, naturally,” for the Flood. Ras Tafari, who could trace his lineage back to the union of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba—in the Ethiopian version of the story, they sired a child—was anointed with seven oils that dripped down his face and hair. As the chanting grew from the sea “of priestly throats,” Tafari Makonnen rose above his title of Ras, meaning “head” or duke, and took on his sanctified baptismal name, Haile Selassie, “Power of the Trinity.” He was duly vested with the symbols of power: the imperial scepter and the orb, a jeweled sword, a ring inlaid with diamonds, two gold filigree lances, unfathomably long scarlet robes, and the crown, glistening with emeralds. “Nothing disturbed the impressive solemnity save the staccato exhaust of low-flying airplanes which circled above,” observed the National Geographic staff photographer W. Robert Moore. “Otherwise the centuries seemed to have slipped suddenly backward into Biblical ritual.”
Outside in the daylight, lining streets recently paved and shaded with eucalyptus, perched upon the distant hilltops as far as the eye could see, were the multitude of Ethiopian citizens, wrapped in white robes and carrying white parasols, awaiting word of the sovereign. There were thousands of Ethiopian soldiers in starched uniforms, guarding newly erected monuments to the King of Kings, alongside the leagues of warriors from the interior in full tribal dress. The sunlight danced off the surfaces of their gilded rhinoceros shields. “The country is surrounded, or embraced, we might say, by African colonial possessions of Great Britain, France, and Italy,” Southard noted.
They had now gathered inside the throne room: the representatives of a world that had tried to colonize Ethiopia and failed, delegates of a global system that self-destructed in the stock market crash only a year before. Haile Selassie sat upon his scarlet throne and serenely watched, in Southard’s words, as “the princes then made obeisance on bended knee.” The cannons fired a 101-gun salute. “There is the fanfare of a thousand trumpets,” the US consul proclaimed. “The triumphant ululation of tens of thousands of waiting women is released in waves over the city of the ‘New Flower.’” The Lion and his empress drove off to their luncheon in a horse-drawn carriage, last seen at the court of Kaiser Wilhelm II.
* * *
On the other side of the earth, on the island of Jamaica, several people had the same idea almost simultaneously. At first it was just an inkling, a rising suspicion, the glimmer of a thought, but of a kind that could tear apart the universe and build it anew. It began to circulate without anyone thinking to consult the Ethiopian monarch, to ask for his opinion or consent, or even notify him with a telegram. A thirty-five-year-old theorist, Leonard Percival Howell, convened a meeting to announce the idea in public, in a marketplace known as Redemption Ground in downtown Kingston. The crowds that gathered around him were small at first, but as Howell took his message from one street corner to the next, and to the neighboring parishes, moving east along the coast, his listeners grew. He handed out flyers; discarded on the street, they skittered along the pavement and floated when they caught the breeze.
King of Kings and Lord of Lords of Ethiopia
BLACK PEOPLE! BLACK PEOPLE!
Arise and shine for the Light is come
God was a living man, alive on earth right now. He had high cheekbones, all-seeing eyes, a dark beard and black skin, and wore velvet robes of scarlet and gold. By April 18, 1933, when police officers first began to take note, two hundred people had gathered around the apostle, poised atop a wooden barrel. “I heard Leonard Howell, the speaker, said to the hearers: ‘The Lion of Judah has broken the chain, and we of the black race are now free. George the Fifth is no more our King,’” an officer reported. On an island still under British colonial rule, Howell spoke of how the British king’s own son had made obeisance on bended knee to a new messiah. He passed around a photograph of the Duke of Gloucester, looking dazed in Addis Ababa beneath his furry busby hat. One must not pay taxes nor rent to the British government, Howell instructed, for Jamaica now belonged to the children of the new god. “‘The white people will have to bow to the Negro Race,’” the police transcribed, and dispatched the report to Jamaica’s crown solicitor. “The man is a stupid ranter who puts forward an imaginary being or person who he calls ‘Ras Tafari’ and whom he describes as Christ as well as King of Ethiopians,” the solicitor wrote in a letter of advice to the attorney general. Fearing that pressing charges of sedition against Howell would only serve to advertise his message, he suggested “the Lunatic Asylum” instead.
Preaching was in Leonard Howell’s blood; his father, Charles, when he wasn’t tending the family fields in Clarendon parish, had worked as a lay minister in the Anglican church, the conduit to the Almighty authorized by Jamaica’s overlords. As a teenager, Leonard was shipped off to Panama for work, then became a cook on US marine ships during the First World War before settling in New York in the 1920s. He worked construction jobs on Long Island and opened a tearoom on 136th Street in Harlem, where it was said he also provided certain mystical services. In 1931, Howell was imprisoned at Sing Sing for eighteen months for selling medicines without a pharmacist license and serving ganja in his “tea pad.” The following year, he was deported.
Back in Jamaica, he took up the mantle of his father, but he preached a different deity. To a people vilified and dehumanized for the shade of their skin, Howell told that God was a black man. And He resembled the faces in the crowd, such as those who gathered in late May 1933. “You are God and every one of you is God,” Howell said, according to the notes of one British corporal. When it became clear the police would not let Howell out of their sights, the charismatic apostle had strolled into the station and invited the officers to attend his sermons. The corporal, flanked by two armed reinforcements, had taken up the offer and recorded Howell’s words:
I am here to inform You my dear Ethiopians that I can bring the Governor of Jamaica, but he cannot understand me as it is too deep for him.
* * *
Haile Selassie appears as the first of my testaments, for of all men god-swept into divinity in the modern age, he would obtain the greatest number of worshippers; he alone found nearly a million devotees. It had long been foretold that Ethiopia would be the site of a new theogony, among those in the New World living in the obscenity of injustice. From the forced labor camps of scenic plantations to the destitute city slums of the American north, currents of Ethiopianism, a black emancipatory movement, had begun to emerge in the late eighteenth century. Ethiopia, “the land of burnt faces,” the Greek word used for the continent in the Bible, stood as the driving image of liberation, for all Africa and its diaspora. It was the password to access hope. “God decrees to thy slave his rights as a man,” the New York City preacher Robert Alexander Young declared to the white slave owner in his 1829 Ethiopian Manifesto. “This we issue forth as the spirit of the black man or Ethiopian’s right, established from the Ethiopian’s Rock, the foundation of his civil and religious rights.” The distant, mysterious kingdom would be the stone slab upon which a new power would rise.
In 1896, Ethiopia became the only territory to survive Europe’s rapacious “scramble for Africa,” stunning the globe when it defeated an attempted Italian invasion in the Battle of Adwa. This confirmed, for many, its status as the spiritual home of the black diaspora, even if very few families in the New World had ancestral roots in its mountainous terrain. If the white imperialist world, constructed upon the back of black enslavement, was Babylon, city of captivity, Ethiopia was Zion, site of exile and future return. Young had ended his Manifesto with the news that God was preparing the next John the Baptist, to spread word of a coming messiah. “How shall you know this man?” he asked.
A new Zion would require a new scripture, and in 1924, a text was published in Newark, New Jersey, that aimed to supplant the King James Bible. The earlier teachings had become corrupt, for passages such as the vague “curse of Ham” in Genesis 9 were notoriously used to justify slavery. When a drunken Noah was found naked in his tent, his sons Shem and Japheth covered him but Ham in some way humiliated him, and Noah condemned his descendants, supposedly the black race, to servitude. If the Bible upheld centuries of oppression upon the figment of a petty, obscure crime, the true route to salvation would require not only other interpretations, but a different book.
“Now in the year of 1917 A.D., Shepherd Athlyi first went about the City of Newark, New Jersey, U.S.A., telling of the Law…” So told the revelation of The Holy Piby, which appeared, in a large print run, the same year the US government passed a racist law halting Afro-Caribbean immigration to the United States. Its author was Robert Athlyi Rogers, a black pastor hailing from Anguilla. In the Piby, a word whose origin is unknown, Athlyi told of a new creation myth, of an Adam and Eve who were “of a mixed complexion.” He described his own divine annunciation as messenger, the flashing light that had appeared, splitting the heavens open, and the angels who called out: “Athlyi.… Athlyi…” In a climax of holiness, Athlyi wrote, in the third person, of how he came face-to-face with God Himself—an Abyssinian Almighty. “Athlyi advanced towards the Lord with open arms and cried out, ‘O God of Ethiopia, I pray, redeem me, wash me clean and separate me from all gospels that pollute the righteousness of thy name…’” And the God of Ethiopia spoke to him, saying, “Reach out and touch me.” When the shepherd stretched out his right hand, “the eyes of Athlyi lit up like a torch.”
The Ethiopianists saw clearly the paradox: for centuries, white rulers had claimed moral rectitude, to have superior knowledge of God and His ethics, and yet dispossessed, enslaved, and dehumanized fellow men in a way that could only be described as evil—or, to turn their clinical language against them, insane. Why did the God that men like Athlyi or Howell were raised to worship permit the inordinate suffering of the black race? When they prayed, were their words directed to the wrong god? The Ethiopianists knew that sometimes, one paradox could only be surmounted by another.
In The Holy Piby, Newark’s shepherd prophesied a coronation scene. He told of how Elijah placed a crown, inlaid with a star of infinite light, upon the head of a “natural man,” and the heavens rejoiced. “And it came to pass,” Athlyi wrote, “that I saw a great host of Negroes marching upon the earth.… I looked towards the heaven and behold I saw the natural man standing in the east and the star of his crown gave light to the pathway of the children of Ethiopia.” Six years later, the verses in the Piby would prove oracular, beyond even what Athlyi himself had imagined. When news of Haile Selassie’s ascension flooded the airwaves, Athlyi had left New Jersey and was residing in Jamaica. Leonard Howell and his disciples took up his Piby as prophecy and sang its verses as hymns. On August 24, 1931, the same summer the National Geographic issue appeared, Robert Athlyi Rogers decided to take his own life. He was only forty, but his followers would say that, having heard the news of Haile Selassie’s coronation, having seen the photographs, his mission on earth was complete. The shepherd walked across the beach, into the waves, and kept walking until he drowned in the deep.
* * *
It was not only Howell or Athlyi who had the idea. There was Joseph Nathaniel Hibbert, a Jamaican who moved to Costa Rica as a teenager to toil on a plantation. Esoteric by nature, Hibbert devoured occultist tomes, cabbalistic mysteries, and searched for clues in a translation of the fourteenth-century Ge‘ez epic Kebra Nagast, which sang of the Solomonic kings. He joined a society of black Freemasons, the Ancient Mystic Order of Ethiopia, and scaled its ranks. In 1931, not long after Haile Selassie’s coronation, the thirty-seven-year-old Hibbert returned to Jamaica, where he began to preach on street corners that the Ethiopian king was divine. Hibbert had come to this realization without any contact with Howell, whom he only met after he moved to Kingston and found someone already spreading his word. Yet Howell would gain a much larger following, for Hibbert, sometimes glimpsed in full masonic regalia—green satin robes, yellow turban, saber, heavy Star of David, and adornments of red, green, and gold—was so occult that he declined to share the innermost secrets with others.
There was also the Jamaican sailor Henry Archibald Dunkley, who worked for the United Fruit Company. He was standing on a dock in Hoboken, New Jersey, when he heard news over the radio, “that they crown a strange king in Africa.” “Immediately after the announcement came,” Dunkley remembered, “snow fell same time, it fell fast, and I said to myself same time: from 1909 I have been looking for this individual, this King of Kings.” Guided by the light of his blizzard epiphany, Dunkley quit his job and returned to Jamaica in early December. Before long, the sailor found himself robbed of all his earthly belongings. “After that,” he said, “I went on a very high place…” Renouncing all materialistic pursuits, Dunkley decided to read through the King James Bible page by page, to find evidence for his conviction that Haile Selassie was the messiah returned. Two years of close reading, and verses in Ezekiel, Isaiah, Timothy, and especially Revelation 19 assured him:
His eyes were as a flame of fire, and on his head were many crowns … And he hath on his vesture and on his thigh a name written, KING OF KINGS, AND LORD OF LORDS.
By mid-1933, independently of Howell or Hibbert, Dunkley had opened his own mission in Kingston. His sermons drew a burgeoning crowd of curious listeners and armed police. When he refused to stop preaching, Dunkley was dragged down from his platform and thrown in jail. A medical examiner was called in to evaluate him. “Lock him up, he is mad,” the doctor said.
But the idea could not be contained. Among the earliest converts were the Bedwardites, who added their numbers to the swelling ranks of Leonard Howell’s flock. To a people who had endured centuries in chains, only to find in Jamaica’s 1834 emancipation continuing enslavement under another name, the revivalist teacher Alexander Bedward spoke of liberation. He rejected the versions of Christianity that upheld white imperialist rule, preaching instead in the tradition of Jamaica’s Native Baptist churches, which drew upon African healing traditions. With a keen sense of injustice, Bedward had fought for years against the deep structural inequalities of Jamaica, an island where the majority lacked the right to vote and poverty was eternal. On an infamous New Year’s Eve in 1920, Bedward and his chief disciple, Robert Hinds, had assembled their followers by the banks of the Hope River. They announced the hour had come for them to escape the confines of their tropical prison and fly up to heaven in a rapturous ascent.
Some say Bedward waited, at midnight, aboard his chariot, a chair perched in a tree, but nothing happened. Others say that at the appointed time, everyone jumped from the treetops, breaking numerous arms and legs. In the wake of their attempted flight, ridiculed in the Jamaican press, Bedward and Hinds were tried at the Half Way Tree Courthouse and sentenced to imprisonment in Bellevue, Jamaica’s grim psychiatric asylum. While Hinds was released, Bedward would languish there for nine years. Six days after Haile Selassie’s coronation, Bedward divested his body in his prison cell. Having heard the good news, the Jamaican preacher determined his terrestrial work was done. His father called him home, his tombstone read.
There were others, who identified the divinity of Haile Selassie in an entirely different way. The ancestors from the Kongo region, kidnapped and sold into the Atlantic slave trade, had brought with them Kumina, rites of drumming, dancing, and trances in worship of an Old World pantheon of deities and spirits. They knew that whatever befell them, Kumina was a space of inviolability deep within, out of the slave owner’s reach. They knew it would sustain them, as did a later wave of Kongolese immigrants who arrived in Jamaica after abolition as indentured laborers and kept Kumina aflame. In 1930, the island was plagued by a drought, yet just as reports of the coronation came over the radio, the rain came down. Kumina adepts declared that Haile Selassie was Nzambi a Mpungu, the supreme Creator in Kongo cosmology, who also went by the name Mbùmba. He was a deity often depicted as a gigantic serpent, resting by the edge of the sea.
In Kumina, it was not considered strange for a god to incarnate as a man; its philosophy was unburdened by any vast theological chasm between heaven and earth. It was thought that adepts themselves could become divine momentarily in spirit possession rituals, when gods and ancestral spirits entered them and acted through them. Nzambi was also the power of the soul, a creative life force that stands at the beginning of all things, a concept that would lend its misunderstood syllables to the word zombie. In Haiti, when a group of enslaved freedom fighters met in secret in a sheltering forest on an August night in 1791, the invocations that sparked the Haitian Revolution were chanted in the name of this same deity. This was the first modern anti-colonial uprising, which led the French colony to independence and broke the shackles of white rule. As Nzambi a Mpungu, Haile Selassie was recognized, alive a century later, as the revolution’s patron god.
* * *
Leonard Howell could often be spotted in Kingston, standing on the steps of a Methodist church, preaching that heaven was a white man’s trick. Black people were taught to reject wealth in this life and remain quiescent as they awaited the silver and gold of the next—while the whites grew rich off their myth. Heaven was not in the clouds, like Christian priests taught, or even as Bedward had imagined: it was a real place on earth, Howell maintained, and Haile Selassie was organizing a plan to repatriate Africans there. The steamships that would carry home the black diaspora would arrive on August 1, 1934, the centenary of Jamaica’s abolition of slavery.
Howell sold five thousand portraits of Haile Selassie in his kingly robes for a shilling, copied from a photograph in the Illustrated London News. If one wrote one’s troubles on the back and mailed the portrait to the palace in Addis Ababa, Ras Tafari would resolve any grievances and answer all prayers. Better still, the cards would serve as passports when the ships to Ethiopia drew near. It was, in its way, an idea that National Geographic had cultivated, that a photograph could be a passport to another place. There was debate, among the growing hundreds of Howell’s followers, as to whether they would need steamships at all. Some said the people would enter the sea, and the waters would part for them, as if in restitution for the voyage in the other direction. They would take a straight path across the Atlantic sea floor, passing the bones of ancestors, in a procession of redemption and deliverance, with the distant light of Ethiopia showing the way.
* * *
Atop the soil where Tafari Makonnen’s umbilical cord was buried, a church was raised. In the remote province of Harar, a month’s journey to the east on horseback from Addis Ababa, a princess gave birth nine times. Each child born to Yeshimebet, the beautiful wife of the governor Ras Makonnen, was stillborn or died in infancy, but the tenth child, born in 1892, lived. When his mother died, in labor once more, the young Tafari was placed under the care of his uncle and aunt. He saw little of his illustrious father, who was preoccupied with his work managing and modernizing Harar. Ras Makonnen led Ethiopian forces to victory against the Italians at Adwa, and served on diplomatic missions for his cousin, the Emperor Menelik II, who named him as successor to the throne. Despite his absence, the young Tafari would grow to resemble his father in his slight frame and delicate features, eyes that saw everything, and the understated way he exuded power. When Makonnen lay dying of typhoid, he sent the emperor a letter charging him with guardianship of his son. “Protect him well, and be assured that I will hold you to account for this in the Afterlife before a Higher Judge,” he wrote. The orphaned Tafari was brought to the palace in Addis Ababa, where he began to discreetly observe the mechanics of power.
After the Emperor Menelik suffered a series of strokes, he announced that his grandson, Lij Iyasu, would be his successor. The conservative elite was dismayed, for many viewed the handsome, hotheaded Iyasu as radical and disrespectful of tradition. The son of a Muslim father forced to convert to Christianity, Iyasu vowed to grant equality to Ethiopia’s suppressed Muslim and Oromo populations and seemed poised to threaten the old feudal hierarchies. Vilified as a secret Muslim and a conspicuous womanizer, Lij Iyasu was excommunicated from the Orthodox Church, never crowned, and deposed in a coup led by Menelik’s widow, the formidable Empress Taitu. Her stepdaughter, Princess Zauditu, became the first woman to reign over Ethiopia since the mythical Sheba, with Ras Tafari appointed as prince regent and heir. It was said the petite Tafari was chosen because he was so obsequious and well behaved, ingratiating himself to everyone at court. The princes of the Ethiopian empire, who possessed private armies and enjoyed autonomy in fiefdoms far from the capital, thought Tafari unlikely to encroach upon their rule.
It may also be that he was so wily no one noticed his maneuverings as he spun a web of strategic alliances. He swiftly began to strengthen the central government in Addis, building institutions, imposing reforms, and circulating his own newspaper, the Light’s Revealer. He saw his work as a tireless attempt to awaken Ethiopia into modernity after a long sleep. “My country, you see, is like Sleeping Beauty in her castle in the forest, where nothing has changed for two thousand years,” he told an interviewer. “I have to struggle … against the inertia of my people, who prefer to close their eyes against that dazzling light.”
Imperialist Europe was wide-awake, and eyed Ethiopia with a predator’s gaze. Under the wartime Treaty of London, secretly signed in 1915, Britain and France promised Italy more territory in East Africa in the event of victory if it joined the Allied side. When Italy sought to claim its Abyssinian prize, the European powers enforced a weapons embargo that left Ethiopia without the means to defend itself. Attempting to preserve its sovereignty, Ras Tafari successfully negotiated its acceptance into the League of Nations, as the first independent African member, in a further triumph for Ethiopianism. He embarked on an international state tour, accompanied by the noblemen he didn’t trust enough to leave at home. Whether glimpsed in a Parisian motorcade or conferring with Pope Pius XI in Rome, the travels of the exotic prince regent were avidly followed by the press. Just as the Shepherd Athlyi was prophesying hosts of cherubs in The Holy Piby, Ras Tafari was in Jerusalem, where, as he strolled through the white stone alleyways of the city, he heard a heavenly music. It was the sound of a marching band of forty Armenian orphans, survivors of the genocide. The future god was so moved that he decided to adopt them and bring them to Addis Ababa to serve as his imperial brass band. He would call them his angels.
“There is nothing that is human which can avoid returning to dust,” he wrote, proclaiming the news in April 1930 that the Empress Zauditu had met her demise. In preparation for his coronation, Ras Tafari began to transform the city, building electrical poles and plywood triumphal arches, telegraph lines to carry the word, and accommodations for the delegates from all corners of the earth. To bring them to Addis Ababa would be a powerful display for his enemies among Ethiopia’s provincial rulers, known to plot coups. He commissioned kingly accoutrements for himself and his wife, the statuesque Princess Menen, and sent a friend back to Jerusalem to acquire a slab of rock hewn from Solomon’s temple, upon which to position their thrones. He ordered thirteen lion-mane headdresses from London’s Savile Row, using the same milliner who fashioned bearskins for the king’s guards. He worked in haste to dispel the cloud of illegitimacy that hung over his ascent, for Iyasu, Menelik’s rightful heir, was still alive and kept imprisoned. He instructed the Armenian angels to debut an Ethiopian national anthem. On the eve of the ceremony, at an ungodly hour of the night, the British consul was surprised to catch sight of Tafari himself, attending to a last-minute task.
“I saw a little group of men in the twilight in the middle of the road,” Major R. E. Cheesman recalled. “I got out of the car and walked towards them and someone said in a subdued tone: ‘Janhoy!’ [Majesty!] There he was with a handful of men, within a few hours of his Coronation, inspecting a patch in the road which was being mended with a steamroller.”
Copyright © 2021 by Anna Della Subin