"The Rastafarian movement is no longer a mere revolutionary movement;
it has become a part of the establishment, a part of officialdom."
~L. Barret
Rastafari is, before it is anything else, a way of life. It offers approaches and answers to real problems black people face in daily living; it promotes spiritual resilience in the face of oppressive poverty and underdevelopment. It produces art, music and cultural forms, which can be universally recognized and appreciated. More important, Rastafari provides a positive self-image, an alternative to people who need and cannot find or accept one elsewhere. I will reflect on the Rastafarian lifestyle, including history, population, music, symbols, and beliefs.
The original Rastas drew their inspiration from the philosophies of Marcus Mosiah Garvey (1887-1940), who promoted the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in the 1920s. The organization's main goal was to unite black people with their rightful homeland, Africa. Garvey believed that all black people in the western world should return to Africa since they were all descended from Africans. He preached that the European colonizers, having fragmented the African continent, unfairly spread the African population throughout the world. As a result, blacks were not able to organize themselves politically or express themselves socially. Their intellect had been stunted by continuous European oppression. Enslavement had provided blacks with a "slave mentality" so that they had come to accept white racist definitions of themselves as inferior. For Garvey, blacks in the Americas had not only been repressed physically, but their minds had been affected by years of white subordination. Slavery had degregaded them so badly that they ac ...