Page "Rastafari movement" Paragraph 30

The Rastafari Movement was founded by Leonard Percival " Gong " Howell in 1932.

Leonard P. Howell was a Mystic Jamaican born in the hills of Clarendon, Jamaica in 1898.

Howell left Jamaica as a youth traveling the world over returning to Jamaica from the United States of America on November 17, 1932.

He had taken voluntary deportation after his application for citizenship was denied.

On his return to Jamaica, he was appalled at the standard of living of the enslaved African people who were now being released from plantation slavery.

They were poor, penniless and desolate after hundreds of years of British and Spanish slavery, hungry, suffering yaws, cholera and yellow fever.

The governing British were unwilling to help the former slaves and doctors ' fees were far more than the majority could afford.

Despite being officially freed of slavery, many black Jamaicans were left with no option but to work in the jobs they had previously carried out as slaves, at very low wages.

Colonialism left the people with a very low self-image in 1932 Colonial Jamaica.

Their knowledge of their ancestral roots in Africa and African royalty had been lost to them through hundreds of years of slavery.

Leonard P. Howell saw it as his task to rebuild the broken men and women, his people.

He wrote " The Promised Key " the doctrine of Rastafari in Accara, Ghana and many other works which were burnt by the colonial government References :- Daily Gleaner Jamaica, The First Rasta by Helen Lee