Leonard Howell and Pinnacle: The First Rasta and His Commune

Leonard Percival Howell (1898–1981) was the most influential of the first Jamaican preachers who proclaimed Haile Selassie I as the returned Messiah, and he is widely remembered as "the first Rasta". After a sedition trial in 1934 and the publication of his tract The Promised Key, he founded Pinnacle, a self-governing Rastafari community in the hills of St Catherine that lasted from 1940 until police destroyed it in 1954.

The wider background of Ethiopianism, Marcus Garvey and the other early preachers is told in the origins of Rastafari; this article follows Howell himself and the community he built.

Early Life, Travels and the Garvey Years§

Howell was born on 16 June 1898 in the parish of Clarendon, in rural central Jamaica, into a family of small farmers. Much of what is known about his early life comes from his own later statements, police files and newspaper reports, and the historian Robert A. Hill and the journalist Hélène Lee, his two main biographers, both caution that the record is patchy. Like many young Jamaicans of his generation he left the island to find work. He is known to have worked at sea and to have spent a long period in the United States, above all in New York, from around the end of the First World War into the early 1930s.

Those were the years of Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association, of the Harlem Renaissance and of a flourishing Black press that followed events in Africa closely. Howell moved in this world. Hill suggests he was also influenced by the many esoteric and religious movements of Harlem in the 1920s, from Black Israelite congregations to fraternal and mystical orders, and that he absorbed a broadly millenarian outlook: the conviction that the present world order was about to be overturned. Howell later claimed experiences, including military service in Africa, that his biographers have not been able to confirm. By the end of 1932 he was back in Jamaica, by most accounts after trouble with the American authorities.

Preaching the King: St Thomas and the 1934 Sedition Trial§

Within weeks of his return Howell was preaching in Kingston that Ras Tafari, crowned Emperor Haile Selassie I in November 1930, was the King of Kings foretold in Scripture and the true sovereign of Black people. He soon moved his work to the parish of St Thomas, in the east of the island, a district of sugar estates with a long memory of the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865 and a strong Revival tradition. He held open-air meetings, and according to police and press reports he sold photographs of the emperor to his hearers, which some understood as tokens of allegiance or even as passports for a future return to Africa.

His message was political as well as religious. Howell told his audiences that Black Jamaicans owed no loyalty to King George V, that Haile Selassie was their rightful ruler, and that the colonial order was coming to an end. The authorities took him seriously. In January 1934 he and his associate Robert Hinds were arrested, and in March they were tried at Morant Bay for sedition. Howell was convicted and sentenced to two years' imprisonment; Hinds received a shorter term. The trial gave the young movement its first public notice and its first martyr, and it set a pattern of conflict with the state that continued for decades.

The Promised Key and Howell's Sources§

Around 1935 a short tract appeared under the name G. G. Maragh, usually read as Gangunguru Maragh. It is attributed to Howell and became one of the earliest written statements of Rastafari belief. The Promised Key proclaims the Ethiopian emperor and empress as King Alpha and Queen Omega, the divine pair who rule the world, calls Black people to separate themselves from the white colonial order, and denounces the established churches and the healers of the Revival "balm yards".

Hill showed in detail that much of the tract is not original. Long passages are taken, with little change, from The Royal Parchment Scroll of Black Supremacy, a pamphlet by the Jamaican preacher Fitz Balintine Pettersburg published around 1926, and the work also echoes the Holy Piby of Robert Athlyi Rogers (1924). For Hill this does not diminish Howell; it shows how early Rastafari grew out of a circulating literature of Black redemption.

The pen name itself has drawn comment. Gangunguru contains the word guru, and Maragh resembles the Hindi title maharaj; many writers connect them with the Indian community that came to Jamaica as indentured labour from 1845 onward. Howell's links with Indian Jamaicans, and the Indian origin of the word ganja, have led some historians to see a South Asian strand in early Rastafari, though how strong it was remains debated. The sacramental place of the herb is treated in ganja in Rastafari.

Pinnacle: The First Rastafari Commune, 1940–1954§

After his release Howell organised his followers in a body known as the Ethiopian Salvation Society, and in 1940 he acquired land at Pinnacle, a former estate in the hills near Sligoville, in the parish of St Catherine, above Spanish Town. There he founded what is generally regarded as the first Rastafari community: a settlement that tried to live apart from Babylon, governed by its own leader and supported by its own labour.

Estimates of its population vary widely, from a few hundred to well over a thousand at its height, and contemporary reports were often hostile. Residents grew yams, vegetables and other food crops, raised animals, burned charcoal and sold produce in the markets. Ganja was also grown, and its sale brought the community income as well as the attention of the police. Howell, known to his followers as "the Gong", presided over the settlement as a patriarch, settling disputes and directing work. In Rastafari memory Pinnacle is remembered as a kind of African kingdom in miniature, a place where Black people owned land and owed nothing to the plantation.

Some traditions also connect Pinnacle with the beginnings of dreadlocks, telling of guards or "warriors" there who let their hair grow. Barry Chevannes and most later scholars instead date the general adoption of locks to the younger Kingston groups of the late 1940s and early 1950s, especially the Youth Black Faith; the different houses that grew from these circles are described in the mansions of Rastafari.

Raids, Dispersal and Howell's Later Years§

Pinnacle was raided by police in 1941, and Howell, along with many residents, was arrested and imprisoned again. The community recovered, but it remained under suspicion as a centre of ganja cultivation and of open contempt for colonial authority. In 1954 a major police operation destroyed much of the settlement and drove out its people. Many of them moved to the slums of West Kingston, especially Back-o-Wall and Trench Town, where they joined and changed the Rastafari groups already there. In this way the dispersal of Pinnacle helped spread the movement through the capital in the decade before independence.

Howell's own later life was difficult. He was committed for periods to Bellevue, the island's mental hospital, and he gradually lost his central place in a movement that was becoming decentralised and suspicious of single leaders. Many younger Rastafari knew him only as a figure from the past. He died in February 1981, the same year as Bob Marley, and his death attracted little public notice at the time.

Howell's Legacy and the Memory of Pinnacle§

For decades Howell was overshadowed in popular memory by Garvey, Haile Selassie and the reggae musicians who carried Rastafari to the world. That changed from the 1990s onward. Hill's Dread History (2001) and Lee's The First Rasta (published in French in 1999 and in English in 2003) presented him as a founder of the faith, and Rastafari began to speak of him with new respect. Several features of later Rastafari can be traced to his preaching: the identification of the emperor and empress as a divine pair, the rejection of loyalty to the British crown, and the ideal of a self-sufficient community on African terms.

Pinnacle itself has become a place of memory and of struggle. As the land passed into private hands and was proposed for development, Rastafari groups campaigned to protect the site and asked the Jamaican state to recognise it as national heritage. The persecution that Pinnacle suffered is remembered alongside the later violence at Coral Gardens in 1963, and both have become part of debates about recognition and reparation discussed in Rastafari today. Scholars of new religious movements see in Howell a classic charismatic founder whose movement survived him by becoming something he did not control.

Frequently asked questions§

Why is Leonard Howell called the first Rasta?§

He was the earliest and best-known preacher to proclaim Haile Selassie's divinity in Jamaica, beginning in 1932–33, and he founded the first Rastafari community at Pinnacle. Other men, such as Joseph Hibbert, Archibald Dunkley and Robert Hinds, reached similar conclusions at about the same time, so "first" is a title of honour rather than a strict historical claim.

What was Pinnacle?§

Pinnacle was a hillside settlement near Sligoville in St Catherine, Jamaica, acquired by Howell in 1940. Hundreds of his followers lived and farmed there until police raids, culminating in 1954, broke it up and pushed its residents into Kingston.

What is The Promised Key?§

The Promised Key is a short tract of about 1935, published under the name G. G. Maragh and attributed to Howell. It proclaims Haile Selassie and Empress Menen as King Alpha and Queen Omega, but much of its text is borrowed from earlier pamphlets such as The Royal Parchment Scroll of Black Supremacy.

When did Leonard Howell die?§

Howell died in February 1981, having spent his later years largely out of public view. His reputation as a founder of Rastafari grew considerably after his death, especially through the biographies by Robert A. Hill and Hélène Lee.

Sources and further reading§

• Dread History: Leonard P. Howell and Millenarian Visions in the Early Rastafari Religion — Robert A. Hill, 2001
• The First Rasta: Leonard Howell and the Rise of Rastafarianism — Hélène Lee, 2003
• The Promised Key — Leonard P. Howell (G. G. Maragh), 1935
• The Royal Parchment Scroll of Black Supremacy — Fitz Balintine Pettersburg, 1926
• Rastafari: Roots and Ideology — Barry Chevannes, 1994
• The Rastafarians — Leonard E. Barrett, 1977
• The Ras Tafari Movement in Kingston, Jamaica — M. G. Smith, Roy Augier and Rex Nettleford, 1960
• Rastafari: From Outcasts to Culture Bearers — Ennis Barrington Edmonds, 2003