The Earth’s Most Strangest Man
A provocative and mysterious work that reflects the radical religious imagination circulating in early Rastafari circles.
Part polemic, part prophecy, this text challenges colonial Christianity and pushes readers toward a more African-centered interpretation of divine history.
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A Review
The radio and television are abuzz with talk of World War III and Iran and Trump, street corners rage with debate about global politics. So escape the noise and clutter I beg thee, that you may sit with Planno’s manuscript on a verandah in Montego Bay as I do, hearing Spanish speaking neighbours new to the community walk by on their way to the community shop or maybe you have the luxury of a good view and are watching the cruise ships drift past, But whatever you do, know that the real Jamaica simmers below the tourist line and you realize that Planno's work isn’t just scholarship—it’s testimony. The Earth Most Strangest Man arrives like a letter from a wise older head who happens to be your uncle, your teacher, and your prophet all at once. Written in 1969, when the island was still shaking off the performance of independence and finding its feet in a world that wanted to reduce Rastafari to a soundtrack, Planno’s work reads less like a textbook and more like a reasoning that got too heavy for the yard and had to be put down on paper before the wisdom escaped.
Today we as Rastafari stand at a crossroads as we watch Cuba, the birthplace of Planno suffer the wrath of America's imperial plan and the newly dubbed Donroe Doctrine. So it is no small thing to note that Planno stands at a peculiar crossroads—he’s the man who walked with Haile Selassie I in 1966, who helped steady the crowd when the Lion landed at Palisadoes, who mentored Marley, and who went on the 1961 Mission to Africa when repatriation was still a concrete plan rather than a metaphor. Because of this, his writing carries a weight that theoretical treatises simply can’t capture. He isn’t observing Rastafari from outside; he’s mapping the terrain from within, navigating between the theological urgency of the Nyabinghi grounds and the cold pragmatism of diplomatic halls. When he writes about Selassie, it isn’t abstract Christology—it’s the theology of a man who stood three feet from the King and felt the earth shift. He traces the titles—“King of Kings, Lion of Judah”—not as academic footnotes but as living evidence, proof that the God of the oppressed chose to manifest in Black royalty precisely when the world was busy denying Black humanity.
What strikes you most, reading this in Montego Bay where the hills still remember the Coral Gardens massacre and where police harassment remains a background hum, is how Planno refuses to let slavery remain in the past. He insists it shape-shifts: from the ships to the banks, from the whip to the curriculum, from the plantation to the political party headquarters. It’s a four-headed beast—chattel, economic, mental, and political—and he names it clearly enough that a youth in Flankers or a elder in Granville can recognize the pattern without needing a sociology degree. When he critiques the PNP and JLP, he isn’t just picking sides; he’s showing how both manage the same colonial estate, just with different color paint. The brown elite still hold the keys, the economy still feeds the former master, and independence remains a costume ball where the chains got lighter but didn’t vanish.
Planno’s structure mirrors how we actually talk—circular, returning, building. He moves from scripture to personal memory to political prophecy without warning, because that’s how truth arrives in a reasoning session. One moment he’s decoding Revelation through Ethiopian eyes, rejecting the missionary interpretations that taught us to hate ourselves; the next he’s detailing the 1961 Mission’s failures, the Shashamane land grants that the government tried to sabotage, or the internal fractures within the movement itself. He doesn’t hide the tensions—between those who want to fly to Africa tomorrow and those who believe we must heal Jamaica first, between the locksmen and the house Rastas, between the dreamers and the diplomats. It’s honest work, vulnerable even, which is rare in writings about faith.
The language itself breathes resistance. Planno writes in English that hasn’t forgotten its Creole roots—straight enough that the message carries, but rhythmic enough that you hear the drums underneath. When he uses “I and I,” it’s not a gimmick; it’s the theological spine of the whole piece, the understanding that divinity sits within the person, that the individual and the collective share one breath, that we are all fragments of the same sacred whole. It’s a grammar of unity in a world designed to separate.
For those of us trying to hold both the academy and the community—writing papers by day and attending groundation by night—Planno offers a blueprint for integrity. He demonstrates that you can analyze neocolonial economics while acknowledging that prophecy is real data. You can critique the movement’s internal contradictions without betraying it to Babylon’s cameras. The manuscript’s physicality, even down to the multi-colored ink he used, suggests that this knowledge is alive, color-coded, refusing to be standardized into the black-and-white of colonial print.
Reading him now, with all the hindsight of reggae’s globalization and the ongoing struggle for reparations, his warnings about neo-colonial politics feel almost painfully prescient. He knew that political independence without economic and psychological liberation was just a changing of the guards. He understood that repatriation had to happen in the mind before it could happen at the airport—that Zion is as much a consciousness as a coordinate.
So when we talk about Planno in the yards today, we’re not just citing a historical figure. We’re acknowledging an elder who managed to put the thunder of Trench Town into sentences without losing the thunder. His work reminds us that Rastafari isn’t a museum piece for tourists to photograph; it’s a continuous, difficult, beautiful argument with history, demanding that we recognize the “strangest” perspectives often contain the truest truths. For the bredren in the university library and the sistren selling ital stew by the roadside, his voice bridges those worlds—not by watering down either one, but by showing that deep thought and rooted culture have always been the same conversation.