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Maytals and Eric Donaldson. Long before many of his contemporaries, Seaga understood that Jamaica was the kind of place where it was hard to tell where the politics ended and the music began.
    But the economy, still dependent on the former colonial arrangements, sputtered. Banana farming needed price supports and protection. The bauxite and tourist industries—the kind of businesses that extracted more than they put in—were growing, but had little effect on an island where more than one in three was unemployed. Here was where the optimism of official nationalism broke down.
    The gospel of Rastafari offered faith, history, prophecy and redemption, a people’s nationalism that countered the official nationalism. Rastafarians followed in the tradition of the Black nationalist Marcus Mosiah Garvey. Born in 1887 in the northern town of St. Ann’s Bay, Garvey’s mother had wanted to name him Moses. His followers in the Black diaspora of the Caribbean, North and Central America, and Africa—which, at the peak of his powers, likely numbered in the millions—called him the Black Moses.
    Inspired by Booker T. Washington’s
Up From Slavery
, and moved by the debased condition of Black farmers and canal workers he met on a visit to Panama, Garvey returned to the streets of Kingston to preach Black redemption and repatriation to a united Africa. He founded the United Negro Improvement Association in 1914 to formally spread the message. “Wake up Ethiopia! Wake up Africa!” he told his followers. “Let us work towards the one glorious end of a free, redeemed, and mighty nation. Let Africa be a bright star among the constellation of nations.”
    Two years later, Garvey left for Harlem after followers discovered he had used organization funds to pay for his living expenses. In the United States, Garvey’s fiscal weaknesses were further exploited when he became the political target of a young Justice Department official named J. Edgar Hoover. But while his reputation had been sullied, his words remained the stuff of prophecy. He had said, “We Negroes believe in the God of Ethiopia, the everlasting God—God the Son, God the Holy Ghost, the one God of all ages.” And by the mid-1930s, former Garveyites found that God in the figure of Ethiopia’s newly crowned emperor, born Ras Tafari—”Ras” meaning “Duke” in Amharic and “Tafari” the surname of the royal family—and renamed Haile Selassie, “The Might of The Trinity.”
    To the followers of Rastafari, Selassie was god made flesh, the King of Kings, the conquering lion of Judah, the redeemer and the deliverer of the Black masses who had come in accordance with Garvey’s prophecy. Rastafarianism was an indigenous fusion of messianism and millenarianism, anticolonialism and Black nationalism, and it gave the cause of “Black supremacy” spiritual, political, and social dimensions. The religion found a fast following in the impoverished western Kingston ghettos, especially in the yard called Back-O-Wall, where Rastas constructed a camp of wood and tin. Through the mid-1960s, amidst frequent and constant run-ins with the colonial authorities, their influence over the tenement yards grew.
    Under a musician named Count Ossie, Rastafarians learned Burru drumming, an African art that had survived from the days of slavery and had come to the Kingston ghettos after slavery was abolished. Burru centered on the interplay of three drums—the bass drum, the alto
fundeh
, and the repeater. The repeater was reserved for the best drummer, who imbued it, in the scholar Verena Reckford’swords, with color and tension, protest and defiance. 1 DJs, the Jamaican term for rappers, would later mimic the play of the Burru repeaters over reggae instrumentals, echoes across time.
    Count Ossie gave the Rastas a medium for their message, and the drumming spread with Rastafarianism across