Look, I need to say something about this Marcus Garvey and early Rastafari business, and I'm going to say it plain.
You see this picture making the rounds? The one showing Garvey calling early Rastas "religious fanaticism" while Rastas called him "The Apostle"? People love to post this like it's some kind of "gotcha" moment. Like we're supposed to pick sides. Like we have to choose which ancestor to love and which to leave behind.
I say: this is a family dispute. And we need to start treating it like one.
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The Facts on the Ground
Let me give you what happened, because the history matters.
Marcus Garvey, born in St. Ann's Bay, Jamaica, in 1887, built the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) into the largest mass movement of Black people in history . His message was simple: Africa for the Africans, racial pride, self-reliance, and eventually, repatriation. When he spoke, people listened. When he organized, people moved.
The early Rastafarians—Leonard Howell, Archibald Dunkley, Joseph Hibbert, and others—came directly out of Garvey's orbit. Howell had been a Garveyite in Harlem during the early 1920s . Shepherd Athlyi Rogers, who wrote The Holy Piby (often called the "Blackman's Bible"), revered Garvey so deeply that he formally pronounced him an "apostle" in that text . When Haile Selassie was crowned Emperor of Ethiopia in November 1930, these Garveyites saw the fulfillment of something they'd been waiting for. Here was a Black king, sitting on a throne tracing back to Solomon and Sheba, ruling the only African nation that had successfully defended itself from European colonization .
They connected dots that Garvey himself had sketched: the Ethiopianist tradition reaching back through centuries of Black preaching, the Psalms verse about "Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God," the call to "look to Africa" where a king would be crowned .
But here's where it gets messy.
Garvey wanted nothing to do with them.
In 1932 and 1933, writing in his newspaper The New Jamaican, Garvey attacked what he called "curious religious cults" driven by "ignorance and superstition" . He barred Leonard Howell from selling photographs of Haile Selassie at UNIA headquarters in Edelweiss Park. By 1934, he was referring to the "Ras Tafari cult" with open contempt, and UNIA officials were calling for the island's intelligentsia to stamp out the movement entirely .
Old Garveyites who knew Howell from Harlem described him as a "con-man" and a "mystic man," and noted that Garvey had already declared against him in New York .
And it didn't stop with Howell. Garvey eventually took issue with Selassie himself. When Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935 and Selassie was forced into exile, Garvey initially supported him. But when Selassie arrived in London and refused to meet with Garvey and other Black activists—turning instead to white officials and the League of Nations for help—Garvey felt the rejection keenly . He began writing editorials blasting Selassie for his weakness, for his lack of identification with ordinary Black people, for caring more about his Solomonic bloodline and his royal connections to England than about the masses who worshipped him .
Some say a meeting was supposed to happen in England. Some say Selassie canceled. Either way, by 1937, Garvey was being heckled off platforms in Hyde Park by African students enraged at his criticism of the Emperor .
So there you have it. The prophet disowned the prophecy. The father rejected the child.
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So What?
Here's my question: So fucking what?
This is like watching your parents argue at the dinner table and thinking the whole family is falling apart. This is like hearing your grandfather say something backwards about your cousin's choices and deciding he never loved anybody.
Garvey came up in a certain way. Born in colonial Jamaica, built a movement in the United States, dressed in military regalia, marched down Lenox Avenue in a plumed hat. He learned to fight the master with the master's tools. Suit and tie. Corporate structure. Press releases. Political parties. That was his language, his armor, his way of surviving and striving .
Along comes Leonard Howell, dreadlocks and all, setting up a commune at Pinnacle in St. Thomas, growing ganja, teaching that the King of Ethiopia is God incarnate, telling people to let their hair grow and wait on repatriation. Howell wasn't trying to compete with Europe. He wasn't trying to prove Black people could be as good as white people. He was trying to be something else entirely—something self-determined, something that didn't need Europe's permission to exist .
Of course Garvey quarreled with him. Of course he didn't understand. Straight-laced dads never understand why their kids turn Rasta. That's what dads do. They worry. They fuss. They say "that's not my vision of civilization."
But here's the thing: Howell and the early Rastas didn't need Garvey's permission. They took what he gave them—the Pan-African vision, the call for redemption, the insistence on Black pride—and they ran with it. They carried it somewhere Garvey himself couldn't go. They clothed it in African spirituality instead of European respectability. They found a King who looked like them, not just a politics that spoke for them .
Garvey gave us the skeleton. Rastafari gave it breath.
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What the Scholars Say
And this isn't just me talking. The scholars back this up.
Barry Chevannes, the great Jamaican sociologist, spent decades studying Rastafari. He wrote about the paradox: the most vocal and effective Pan-African religious presence in Jamaica drew from Garvey's ideas while Garvey himself rejected them . But he also showed how Rastafari emerged from deep wells of African retention—Revival, Kumina, Convince—that Garvey, in his suit-and-tie respectability, couldn't access .
Charles Price, in his study of Rastafari identity formation, documents how early converts in the 1940s understood Garvey's rejection: "Garvey, him really see him people start to take up and follow the Rasta people and from that him is very vexed" . They knew he was angry. They knew he didn't approve. They followed him anyway.
The Smithsonian's work on Ethiopianism traces how this identification with Ethiopia ran deeper than any individual leader. From the 18th century onward, Black people in the Americas had been reading Psalm 68:31—"Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God"—as a prophecy of Black redemption . Garvey stood in that tradition. Rastafari stood in that tradition. They were branches of the same tree, even if the branches scraped against each other in the wind .
And Barbara Bair, writing for PBS's American Experience, notes something crucial: despite the actual differences Garvey and Selassie experienced, "they have been lauded together and twinned spiritually in much of black popular culture and faith, and exist in important relationship to one another in Rastafarian belief, in the messages of reggae music, and in many other ways" .
The family stayed family, even when the parents fought.
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What My Grandmother Taught Me
My grandmother had a saying: "We nuh fi wash dutty laundry a road."
Meaning: some conversations are for the family, not for the street. Some disputes are for the gathering, not for the enemy to see.
Every time I see this Garvey-Rasta discourse popping up online—especially in spaces where non-Black people are watching, commenting, using it to divide us—I think about my grandmother. She would look at this and say, "Why you a tell the whole world your parents' business?"
Because here's what happens: the enemy sees us arguing about whether Garvey was right or Howell was right or Selassie was right, and they miss the point entirely. The point is that we were having the argument. The point is that we were figuring out our destiny. The point is that in 1930s Jamaica, a group of poor Black people looked at the crowning of an African emperor and said, "This is our King. This is our God. This is our liberation." And another group of Black people, led by the greatest organizer we'd ever produced, said, "No, liberation looks like this instead."
Both were trying to free us. Both were trying to get us home. They just had different maps.
This is not a debate for Facebook, for the curious gaze of people who don't share our struggle. This is dialogue for the binghi meeting. This is discourse for the family gathering. This is us sitting in a circle, passing the reasoning, figuring out together what our elders meant and where we go from here.
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What We Do With What They Gave Us
Here's my take, and I'll keep it simple:
Garvey gave us economic vision. He gave us political organization. He gave us the Black Star Line, the Negro Factories Corporation, the UNIA, the cry of "Africa for the Africans." When Kwame Nkrumah named Ghana's shipping line the Black Star Line, he was honoring Garvey. When Jomo Kenyatta led Kenya to independence, he was walking a path Garvey helped clear . That stuff matters. That stuff still feeds us.
The early Rastafari gave us something else. They gave us spiritual self-determination. They gave us a God who looked like us, not just a politics that spoke for us. They gave us dreadlocks and ital living and a critique of Babylon that went all the way down to the bone. They gave us a way to be African in the West without apologizing, without explaining, without dressing it up in somebody else's clothes .
Bob Marley gave us the music that carried both—Garvey's fire and Rasta's faith—to every corner of the earth. When he sang "Redemption Song," he was channeling Garvey: "Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our minds." When he sang "Rastaman Vibration," he was channeling Howell and the Pinnacle elders. He didn't choose. He took the best of both and made something new .
That's what we do. That's what we've always done.
We take what our parents and grandparents gave us—all of them, even the ones who argued—and we make the most of it. We pick the best out of what they left us and we build with it. We don't throw any of them away because they had a "minor dispute." We don't disown Garvey because he couldn't see what Rastas saw. We don't disown the early Rastas because Garvey called them fanatics.
We honor them both. We learn from both. We take the DNA from both sides of the family and we make something that carries us forward.
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A Better Way to See It
Think of it like this:
Garvey is the father who worked three jobs, who wore the suit, who learned the system, who taught you to read and count and organize. He wanted you to succeed on the world's terms because that's how he survived. He couldn't always understand why you wanted to grow your hair, why you talked about Zion, why you didn't care about fitting in. But that doesn't mean he didn't love you. That doesn't mean he didn't prepare the ground you're walking on.
The early Rastas are the uncle who left the city, went back to the country, started farming, started praying different, started living by different rules. He seemed strange to the suit-and-tie folks. They said he was crazy, that he'd lost his way. But he was actually finding it. He was reaching back to something older than suits and ties, older than colonial respectability, older than the slave ship.
And you? You're the child who gets to sit at both tables. You get Garvey's discipline and the Rasta's freedom. You get the UNIA's organization and Pinnacle's spirituality. You get the suit when you need it and the locks when you want them. You get to decide.
That's not a contradiction. That's inheritance.
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What I'm Saying
So here's what I'm saying, plain and simple:
Stop letting people use this history to divide you. Stop acting like you have to choose between Garvey and Rasta, between Pan-Africanism and Ethiopianism, between the father and the uncle. They were both ours. They both loved us, even when they didn't love each other's choices. They both fought for us, even when they fought each other.
If Garvey was harsh with Howell, if he wrote those editorials, if he eventually criticized Selassie—so what? That's what family does. That's what happens when people care deeply about the same thing and see different paths to get there. The argument itself proves how much they cared.
And if Selassie snubbed Garvey in London, if that meeting never happened, if the Emperor had his own limitations and his own bloodline preoccupations—so what? That's what leaders do. They disappoint you. They fail you. They turn out to be human. That doesn't mean you throw away everything they represented.
My advice? Take what they gave you. Take Garvey's economic vision and political strategy. Take the Rastas' spiritual depth and cultural self-determination. Take Selassie's dignity and his throne, even if you don't take his politics. Take Bob's music and his message. Take it all, mix it together, and make something that feeds you and your children and your children's children.
And for the love of God, stop washing this dirty laundry in public. Stop letting the enemy watch us argue about who was right and who was wrong. This is family business. This is for the gathering, for the reasoning session, for the circle where we pass the chalice and figure it out together.
Because here's the truth: our parents and grandparents did enough. Garvey did enough. Howell did enough. Selassie did enough. They got us here. They got us alive, aware, still fighting, still hoping.
Now it's up to us to do the rest.
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Selah. Heart o'love. Forward forever.
❤️🖤💚
💚💛❤️
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References
Chevannes, B. (2024). "8 Ships that Will Never Sail": The Paradox of Rastafari Pan-Africanism. In The Paradox(es) of Diasporic Identity, Race and Belonging. Taylor & Francis.
Bair, B. (n.d.). Marcus Garvey and Haile Selassie. American Experience, PBS.
Wikipedia contributors. (2006). Rastafari. Wikipedia.
Smithsonian Institution. (n.d.). Dread History: The African Diaspora, Ethiopianism, and Rastafari. Smithsonian Learning Lab.
Price, C. (2009). Becoming Rasta: Origins of Rastafari Identity in Jamaica. NYU Press.
Hopkins, D. N., & Antonio, E. P. (Eds.). (2012). Black theology in Jamaica. In The Cambridge Companion to Black Theology. Cambridge University Press.
Jamaica Information Service. (2022). 'Africa for Africans' – Garvey's Message of African Nationalism and its Impact.
Randon, T. (2007). Fi Wi Story. New Statesman.