Near to Trench Town, in Jones Town, lived Ernest Ranglin, a professional jazz guitarist influenced by the likes of Charlie Christian and Django Reinhardt. Originally from a hamlet called Harry Watch in Manchester, Ranglin had been a teenage prodigy employed by prominent band leaders such as Eric Dean and Val Bennett, who from the end of the 1940s ran big, swinging dancehall bands in the American style. In Dean’s orchestra Ranglin had shared the stage with another maestro, Don Drummond, who would later be considered one of the world’s top jazz trombonists. Employed from 1958 as the staff guitar-player by JBC Radio, Ranglin was equally considered the Jamaican master of his particular instrument. Frequently, he would find himself in Trench Town, sometimes playing cricket with the local youth, including the Marley boy. ‘Really, it was still a nice area. And even the parts that weren’t, those kids didn’t notice: when you’re a child you only see the good things.’
Even before the 1951 hurricane had mashed down the zinc and packing-case residences of the shantytown, the region had a reputation as an area of outcasts. Specifically, the Trench Town environs had become one of the main homes in Kingston for the strange tribe of men known as Rastafarians, who had set up an encampment down by the Dungle in the early years of the Second World War. Although a few such men – like the trio of ‘mountain lions’, named after the Ethiopian guerrillas who swore not to cut their hair until Ethiopia was freed from Italian occupation – wore their hair long and uncombed, in the manner of Indian saddhus, most only had their faces framed by their matted beards. (It was not until the 1960s that ‘locks’ became common, partially because long hair had the effect – as it did elsewhere in that age – of unnerving the more conventionally coiffured populace. Briefly known as ‘fearlocks’, this soon mutated to the marginally less threatening ‘dreadlocks’.) These primal figures, around whom the funky aroma of marijuana seemed permanently to float like an aura, could appear as archetypal and prophetic as a West African baobab tree or like the living, terrifying personification of a duppy, that most feared of dark spirits on the Island of Springs. It all depended on your point of view and upbringing.
Mortimer Planner (whose surname commonly mutated into ‘Planno’), for example, was considered sufficiently elevated in the Rastafarian brethren to travel in 1961 to the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa to meet His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah; he had first moved to Trench Town in 1939. A very simple reason, he said, had drawn him there – the energy emanating from this part of Kingston: ‘Trench Town is a spiritual power point.’ Yet others in the area were not at all happy about the presence of these men with their curious belief that Haile Selassie was God. For example, a young woman called Rita Anderson, a worshipful member of the Church of God, would go out of her way to hurry across the road to avoid them; her parents had told her the truth about these people: that Rastafarians lived in the drainage gullies and carried parts of people they had murdered in their bags. No doubt it was such thinking that was the basis for the sporadic round-ups of Rastas – known at that time on the island as ‘beardmen’ – by the police, who would shove them into their trucks and cut off their locks.
In 1960, dynamite and assorted weapons were discovered at the Kingston home of Claudius Henry, a prominent Rastafarian who was a supporter of the Cuban revolutionary president Fidel Castro; Claudius Henry billed himself as the ‘Repairer of the Breach’ and had predicted repatriation to Africa would occur the previous 5 October, to this effect having sold hundreds of postcards that he claimed to be passports. The search of Henry’s home was prompted by an incident involving his son Ronald; in company with other ‘beardmen’, Ronald had shot and killed two soldiers, for which the culprits were later hanged. At the time, Prime Minister Norman Manley delivered his thoughts to the nation on followers of Rastafari: ‘These people – and I am glad that it is only a small number of them – are the wicked enemies of our country. I ask you all to report any unusual or suspicious movements you may see pertaining to the Rastafarians.’ Three years later, Rudolf Franklyn, a Rastaman who had been brutalised and imprisoned by police, took his revenge, murdering two people on the edge of the north-coast tourist town of Montego Bay. The next day, Good Friday, 12 April 1963, Norman Manley’s successor and cousin, Alexander Bustamante, sanctioned an attack by Jamaican security forces on Franklyn’s Rasta encampment in Coral Gardens, near Montego Bay; Franklyn and several associates were shot dead and across the island police beat Rastafarians and shaved off their hair.
In the twenty-first century, dreadlocks are ubiquitous in many parts of the world – though often as a fashion statement rather than as an emblem of religious belief. This would seem to be missing the point for Jamaica’s followers of Rastafari; after all, they are fully aware that, at this time of great change, humanity is living in the last days. Following the prediction of the Book of Revelation, upright dreads believe that only the righteous will move forward through the apocalypse into the new era: only 144,000 souls, those who have battled to save the world from the perpetrators of the Babylonian greed and destruction that are all around and which are endeavouring to destroy both humanity’s essential good and the environment in which positivity may flourish.
In the 1920s, the rhetorical fuel that would help bring about such fiery thinking was provided by Marcus Garvey, the colourful prophet of black self-determination. Garvey, who had been born in St Ann in 1887 and founded the United Negro Improvement Association, spoke to an audience at Madison Square Garden in New York of ‘Ethiopia, Land of our Fathers’, and proclaimed that ‘negroes’ believed in ‘the God of Ethiopia, the everlasting God’. Most significantly, he delivered a pivotal pronouncement: ‘Look to Africa, for the crowning of a Black King; He shall be the Redeemer.’ (Later, there was some debate about this: was it Garvey who said these words? For an associate of his, the Reverend James Morris Webb, the author of A Black Man Will be the Coming Universal King, Proven by Biblical History, had spoken to the same effect at a meeting in 1924.)
In 1930, rising above aristocratic in-fighting which could have overshadowed that in a Medici court, Ras Tafari Makonnen, great-grandson of King Saheka Selassie of Shoa, was crowned Emperor of Ethiopia and given the name of Haile Selassie, King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah. Surely this was the fulfilment of Garvey’s prophecy?
As they were elsewhere in the world, the 1930s were years of social unrest and upheaval in Jamaica. Labour unrest on the island in 1938 culminated in the vicious suppression of striking sugarcane workers on the Tate & Lyle estate at Frome in Westmoreland in the west of Jamaica. Under the orders of Tate & Lyle, the estate’s manager, a member of the Lindo family, met with six hundred plantation workers and dismissed out of hand their demands for wages of a minimum of four shillings a day, offering half that amount.
After hearing the addresses of assorted labour leaders, including Alexander Bustamante, then the leader of the new Jamaican labour movement, the workers attacked the Tate & Lyle offices and assaulted the European staff. Local police fixed bayonets and advanced on the employees: four strikers were killed, including an elderly woman who was bayoneted to death. Dozens were rounded up and jailed, including Bustamante.
Such labour and social unrest was a perfect context for the rise of a band of islanders who had divorced themselves mentally from