You wake up to a neighbouring tribe rampaging through your village.
They have weapons that you can't understand.
You can’t fight back.
They murder your elders, shackle together the rest and march them towards the coast.
On that walk, your sister will die.
When you get there, you’ll never see your family again.
There at the coast, there are boats waiting with men who you can’t understand.
They've a different language, a different culture.
And yet, they own you.
As you get on that ship, they put you below deck and stack you like cordwood.
Your neighbour dies.
They pull him out and throw him to the sharks.
After weeks of waiting, you finally arrive in your new island prison home.
There, you’ll die.
Your children will die.
But before they've worked you to death on that plantation, they're going to force you to learn a new language.
Their language.
They're going to force you to take on a new culture.
Their culture.
Or they'll whip you.
But most of all, you’ll going to learn to love a new God.
Their God.
This is not the story of slavery.
This is the story of Rastafarianism.
Of inequality.
The fire where new religions are forged.
I’m not meant to understand Rastafarianism.
Despite the fact that as a young man I made the very regrettable decision of growing dreadlocks,
it isn’t a religion for me.
The experiences it details aren’t mine.
My family immigrated to the New World intentionally.
We could read the bible in our own language.
We could come to the culture on our own terms.
My family could have farms, we could have shops,
we can even have one of our progeny become an important national icon.
Certainly, we had our hardships.
But our struggle was mostly against nature, not man.
And because of this, our religion was primarily against nature as well.
Prayers were saved for harvest time and meals.
Church was too far from the farm, so it lost its importance in the routine.
Those of my family that sustained their beliefs through the generations did so with confidence
that their God viewed them as most important.
Their farm was the centre of the world, and nobody was around to tell them otherwise.
But for a slave in Jamaica or the American interior, God was not theirs to hold.
Belief was fundamental, required, even, but they were never going to be the centre of it.
The most important beings.
The preachers who could read the holy words weren’t reading for the sake of slaves.
They presided over a congregation black bodies couldn’t join.
God spoke a language it would take them years to learn.
They simply weren’t the most important beings.
They may have been God’s children, but they weren’t the firstborn.
They would never inherit the family farm.
Generations passed.
And while slavery was outlawed and the world changed, the centre never shifted.
Oppressive laws, cultural practices, and organizations sprung up to replace what had come before.
Black people across the Americas, despite being ostensibly free, were undeniably second class citizens.
Even to their God.
By now, most newly freed slave families would have a firm belief in Christianity.
But their saviour was still painted as a white man.
Their God still did not believe them to be firstborn.
And in this backdrop, new religions began to emerge.
Those that could still remember the beliefs of their forefathers attempted to reconcile the rift
by adding African voices to the otherwise European cacophony.
Black preachers, now literate, began to turn a gospel of their own.
In the Southern parts of the African continent, a concept called Ethiopianism was born,
and it would spread across the world.
It believed primarily in the idea of Africa for Africans.
In many ways, it mirrored the racism that birthed it into the world,
but without the cultural and military superiority to back it up.
This wasn’t a religion of unity, just as it hadn’t been born from a religion of unity.
It was a religion of racial superiority.
And while they still believed in the God of their invaders, his ever loving gaze would now look first to black faces.
They would inherit the Earth, as promised.
And in that world of upheaval, a man was born in Jamaica named Marcus Garvey.
He was intelligent, he was educated.
And he was mad as hell.
For everything else he was, though, Garvey was an undeniable racist.
He was a black supremacist, and best understood the world through the lens of race war.
His response to being raised as a second class citizen was not to fight for equalization, but separation.
In a liberated Africa, he proposed, black men could be free to rule as they pleased.
To achieve on their own merits.
To conquer, subjugate, and oppress other races as had been done to them.
He didn’t have the same dream as Martin Luther King Jr., he dreamed of segregation.
And to this end, he would continue the work of white racists in populating the American colony of Liberia,
starting an ocean liner meant to bring back as many black Americans to the African continent as possible.
The goal was to be separate, but it was certainly not to be equal.
And although these words of division stab me and probably many of you like a dagger,
much like the Rastafarianism that would branch from them, they were never really meant for me.
He was speaking to the black people once enslaved in the Americas, and it was in those populations
where some people began to heed his call.
Especially among the lowest class communities, hearing that they may someday be truly free,
in charge, and the centre of both God and man’s attention, couldn’t be overstated.
They weren’t concerned if it was just the same form of racism, only with their race at the helm.
They were the underdog, and the underdog is always waiting for its day.
Garvey’s ideology became a prophecy.
And soon he began to be treated as a prophet.
Those that practice the religion now claim that in 1920, a pseudo-religious Garvey instructed his followers
to “look to Africa where a black king will be crowned.
He will be your redeemer.”
And although he almost certainly never said those words, their meaning had long since been believed.
Ten years later, Haile Selassie, otherwise known as Ras Tafari, the Lion of Judah,
a man who could claim his lineage back to Solomon, was named emperor.
To many this was the prophecy come true.
The fact that it had happened in Ethiopia only further confirmed it.
It was the birthplace of African Christianity. Zion.
For his own part, Garvey was no supporter of Selassie.
To him, he was a coward for running from Italian invasion.
To him, the fact that the slave trade still existed in Ethiopia, showed what a sham his Pan-African ideals truly were.
The fact that he spent more time with American and European dignitaries
over those from African and black nations was near-traitorous.
But to the true believers, the coronation of Haile Selassie meant the fulfillment of biblical prophecy.
His expulsion by fascist Italy and subsequent return only furthered their beliefs.
He was the prodigal king, and he would be the unifier of all Africans.
The next coming of Jesus.
No pressure though.
All across the working class regions of Jamaica, black supremacist preachers began to speak the gospel of Ethiopia.
Of Ras Tafari.
Somewhat ironically, Haile Selassie didn’t agree.
He was no God in his own mind.
In an interview with a Canadian journalist, asking specifically if he believed that he was Jesus,
he said that he had privately told the Jamaicans,
“I am man, I am mortal, and I shall be replaced by the oncoming generation.”
And while he was no doubt happy for the international support and notoriety, he had no interest in uniting black people.
He certainly didn’t want an influx of thousands of poor Jamaicans into his already splintered and impoverished empire.
To his followers in the Caribbean, he may have been a uniter of men,
but in the home country to many he was just another imperialist.
An emperor.
Those that rebelled against his rule were met with military might, and ethnic cleansing.
But the religion was not borne to truth.
It was a response to a lack of truth.
Oppression had led to the creation of Rastafarianism, and oppression helped to spread it.
As preachers began to speak of Selassie as the true ruler of the black race,
nervous British overseers cracked down.
Marijuana became a more prominent enemy of the state, as it was now directly associated
with the violence of rebellious Rastas.
In the wake of newly sustained oppression, some Rastafarians heeded the call that started everything,
and moved to Africa.
Some immigrated to Ghana, where a Pan-African leader was the first to gain independence from the crown,
some to Nigeria where there was a blossoming of economic opportunity,
and some of course, to Ethiopia, where their God was king.
Much of this episode was filmed in the town of Shashamane, Ethiopia.
In the 1960’s, with a trickle of immigrants arriving to praise his name,
the Emperor set aside a patch of land to keep his followers safe.
Because despite their honest belief in the union of all black peoples,
regular Ethiopians never quite took to Rastafarians.
This has never been a country of racial unity.
To locals watching them arrive, the Rastafarians were just another group of foreigners with a strange religion.
To them, their Emperor was not a God, and when he was deposed,
the incoming dictatorship cracked down on those who imagined him to be.
Today, despite having nearly a million members worldwide, less than a few hundred of them
remain in the lands of their God.
Haile Selassie was not Jesus.
And he would have agreed.
I think in Ethiopia, more people probably still remember him for his ethnic cleansing of the Harari
than they do for his Pan-Africanism.
History has not been kind to the causes supported by Marcus Garvey,
nor has it been kind to the religious prophecies of those idealistic Jamaican preachers.
His coronation didn’t unite Africa.
Babylon never fell.
In fact, his rule would mark the fall of the entire Solomonic dynasty.
Haile Selassie was the last Emperor of Ethiopia.
His rule marked not the beginning, but the end.
But as I said at the start of this episode, I was never meant to believe in Rastafarianism.
Its purpose was not to unite the world or find peace between races.
Its missionaries were never intending to convert white college students who liked marijuana.
It existed, and in many ways still exists, as a response to oppression.
To slavery.
But even more than that, it was a response to a struggling people
whose God did not love them like he loved others.
A savior whose face reflected a people not their own.
Religion gives people something to believe in.
To hope for.
But the moment that people can no longer see themselves reflected in their Gods,
they will change them.
This is Rare Earth.