Preserving The First Rasta

By HOWARD CAMPBELL Observer writer

Leonard Howell has long been regarded as the father of the Rastafarian movement, but the details of his life and work remains a mystery to even those who follow the religion he started in the early 1930s.

Three years ago, Helene Lee, a Frenchwoman, went a long way in demystifying Howell when she wrote the biography, Le Premier Rasta (The First Rasta).

Lee's book, which was written in French and released in France, is presently being translated into English by American author, Stephen Davis.

It is scheduled to be released in the United States in early 2003 by Academy Books of Chicago.

The translation is being undertaken by Davis and his 23 year-old daughter, Lily. Initially, Davis was approached by Lee to write an introduction for the English version, but his role expanded when the publishers failed to identify a suitable translator.

"It just so happens that Lily had graduated from college as a French Literature major, so I said, 'well, pay us some money and I'll give it to my daughter and we'll produce a translation'," Davis told SunDay recently.

Davis is familiar with the teachings of Howell, having researched the roots of Rastafari for Reggae Bloodlines, his first book which was published in 1977. He first met Lee in 1978 when she acted as the translator for the French version of Reggae Bloodlines.

For much of the 1990s, Lee made several trips to Jamaica and the United States tracing the footsteps of Howell, talking to family members and Howellites, some of whom still live in the town of Tredegar Park where Howell died in 1981.

During one of her Jamaican visits, Lee told the Observer that the book (distributed by Paris-based Flammarion Publishers) had exhausted its first press run of 9,000 copies. She pointed out that because the French have long been intrigued by Rastafari, it was only natural that Le Premier Rasta went off the shelves in quick time.

At the time, she said there was interest from publishers in other European countries, particularly Germany, to translate Le Premier Rasta in their respective languages.

Like many of her countrymen, Lee discovered Rasta through the emergence of roots-reggae during the 1970s. She first heard about Howell when she came here in the late 1970s and was so awestruck by his philosophy that she decided to write a book about him.

It was a book that begged to be written.

The son of a Baptist minister, Leonard Howell was born in Crawle River, Clarendon in June, 1898. Wanderlust struck him in his teens and led him to the United States where he was influenced by the growing Pan African movement. He reportedly served in the US army, travelled throughout Europe where he was exposed to Socialism, and befriended George Padmore, the Trinidadian many consider the founder of Pan Africanism.

Howell was deported to Jamaica for grand larceny in 1932. He first came to prominence here when he formed the Ethiopian Salvation Society began making public pronouncements that Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie was God and denounced the British monarchy. He was given a two-year sentence for sedition and in 1939 was sent to the Bellevue Asylum.

On his release from Bellevue, Howell's message spread and he founded his first commune in Seaforth, St Thomas. From there, he took part in the Serge Island labour riots of the 1930s.

In 1940, Howell moved his followers to Pinnacle, a 500-acre commune in the hills of Sligoville where self-sufficiency was encouraged and Rastafarians thrived by farming and making craft items.

That all came to an end in 1954 when police raided Pinnacle and arrested many of its residents, claiming its craft manufacturing was a front for a lucrative ganja trade. For all his groundbreaking achievements, however, Howell had drifted into obscurity by the time Selassie visited Jamaica in 1966. When he died, Howell was all but forgotten by the movement he started.

"He has always been depicted as a crazy guy and a violent person which he was not," said Lee three years ago. "With this book I'm trying to do him justice."