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Beliefs,
Practices and Sacraments
of Rastafari
H.I.M
Haile Sellassie
  hen,
in 1930, Ras Tafari Makonnen, great-grandson of King Saheka
Selassie of Shoa, was made Emperor of Ethiopia and proclaimed
Negusa Negast (King of Kings), Jamaica's slum-dwellers and
rural poor, for whom Garvey had been something of a gallant
oracle, regarded this event as the fulfillment of a prophecy
of deliverance. Indeed, Ethiopia had symbolized all of Africa
for the slave-descended Jamaicans since as far back as 1784,
when American Baptist minister George Liele founded the Ethiopian
Baptist Church on the island.
These
"Garveyites" were awed by newspaper and newsreel accounts
of the pomp of Selassie's coronation in Addis Ababa and took
note of the sybolism in the choice of his formal title, Haile
Selassie being an honorific meaning "Power of the Holy Trinity."
Selassie, they knew, claimed to be directly descended from
King Solomon, so they reasoned that he must be the long-awaited
savior of the planet's far-flung African peoples.
In
Africa, Selassie was hailed as the greatest of modern monarchs
and a symbol of the continent's vast potential. In the United
States, residents of Harlem jammed movie houses to watch the
newsreel footage of his coronation. And in the Caribbean,
as elsewhere in the West, the advent of Selassie's reign was
taken as shining proof for all downtrodden people of color
that, as the back-to-Africa Garveyites and the firebrands
of the syncretistic Rastafarian cult had foretold, the day
of Deliverance was at hand.
To
the Garveyites, Haile Selassie I was a hero without peer.
To the Rastafarians he was the Living God of Abraham and Isaac,
He Whose Name Should Not Be Spoken.
Source
: http://www.bobmarley.com
Catch a Fire " The Life of Bob Marley"
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