by Peyton White
Rastafari is far from archiveless; however, the tradition lacks a centralized repository for its artifacts, papers, and media. While the postcolonial Jamaican state inherited many local government files after independence in 1962, colonial surveillance and legal management of the Rastafari brought many records to Britain before and after independence. Studying the early Rastafari therefore requires trodding the transnational colonial currents that birthed the movement and scattered its knowledge across the Atlantic world. In the summer of 2026, I sought to re-member some of the dismembered archive of early Rastafari, conducting research in both Jamaica and the United Kingdom.
Rastafari emerged in the 1930s when Robert Hinds and Leonard Percival Howell began preaching the divinity of the newly crowned Ethiopian sovereign, Haile Selassie I. Drawing on centuries-old Jamaican traditions that centered Ethiopia and Africa within the Bible, Rastafari’s founding brethren and sistren advocated a political Black nationalism rooted in the divinity of Blackness. My dissertation traces how this Black religious nationalism engendered new forms of sovereignty that contested the colonial state. I traveled first to the Jamaica Archives in Spanish Town to interrogate how the government might have recognized or responded to this new religious political movement in the 30s and 40s.
The Jamaica archives contain the original records of Hinds and Howell’s sedition trial in 1934, which is among the earliest traces of Rastafari to be found within any formal archive. The colonial government targeted Howell for selling “fraudulent” postcards depicting Selassie, which he claimed would serve as passports for Jamaicans’ repatriations to Ethiopia.
Other scholars of Rastafari have long cited the Jamaica Archives collection of court records relating to this trial, so I thought to glean this repository to find primary sources that might speak directly to Howell’s sense of Rastafarian nationhood. To my surprise, immediately upon opening the trial files, a loose postcard fell out onto the table. I quickly realized I held in my hands the very card colonial police confiscated from Howell and entered into evidence against him. The card bears Selassie’s image and reads,
Ras Tafari
King of Kings of Ethiopia
A descendant of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba
Presented by Leonard Howell
[Traveled] the World Through
Howell’s passport is an invaluable artifact of his burgeoning vision of Black religious sovereignty. This vision of Rastafari, rooted in Selassie’s divinity and transnational Black nationalism, would indeed travel the world through. In the movement’s early decades, Rastafari people and knowledge of/about Rastafari traversed the British Empire and beyond. The proliferation of Howell and Hinds’ Black nationalist message affronted British imperial governments through the end of Jamaica’s colonization, and metropolitan and local British officials spilled much ink in their attempts to describe, manage, and ultimately curtail the Rastafari. Thus, a full archival accounting requires that we look beyond Jamaica itself toward the colonial metropole.
During their formal withdrawal from Jamaica—and many other former colonies—the British government quietly removed certain sensitive files and clandestinely scattered them throughout repositories in the UK, before ultimately depositing them in the National Archives in Kew. These files are now known as the Foreign and Commonwealth Office Migrated Archives, and among these papers are the reports of Jamaica’s Local Standing Intelligence Committee (LSIC). The LSIC provided intel to the UK government as well as the local colonial regime for purposes of counterinsurgency. Alongside monthly summaries of communist activity, student movements, and trade union organizing, most LSIC reports devote an extensive section to “Rastafarian Activities.” While local Jamaican officials composed these reports to disrupt the Rastafarian movement, they are an invaluable archive of Rastafari in the late colonial period. They provide some of the only extant records of when various Rasta sects met and they name rank-and-file Rastafari brethren and sistren who have otherwise been lost to the movement’s historiography. These surveillant and hostile archives can therefore be reappropriated as a record of vibrant Black religious nationalism, which flourished under extreme duress and informed the governance of the Jamaican polity. The fragmentary and diffused Rastafari archive in Jamaica and the UK reflects the colonial politics which sought to fragment and disperse Black religious visions of freedom in the early-mid twentieth century. In just these two instances, my research in state archives shed light on the political and religious thought of Black nationalists who British colonial officials attempted to silence and obscure. I thank the UT Religious Studies Department for funding the Jamaican leg of this research and the Institute for the Study of Antiquity and Christian Origins (ISAC) for assisting with the UK portion.
Peyton White is a PhD Student in the Religions in the Americas track in the Religious Studies Department of UT Austin. His research focuses on Africana religions in the (post)colonial Caribbean.