The Rastafarian faith is indeed rising in Jamaica, where new census figures show a roughly 20 percent increase in the number of members over a decade, to more than 29,000. While still a tiny chunk of Jamaica's 2.7 million people.
Founded 80 years ago by descendants of African slaves, the Rasta movement's growing appeal is attributable to its rejection of Western materialism, the scarcity of opportunities for young men in Jamaica and an increasing acceptance of it. Other Rastafari adherents follow a more secular lifestyle, marked by a passion for social justice, the natural world, reggae music and the ritualistic use of pot to bring them closer to the divine.
A merging of Old Testament teachings and Pan-Africanism, Rastafarianism emerged in colonial-era Jamaica in the 1930s out of anger over the oppression of blacks. Its message was spread by the reggae songs created by musical icons Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, Burning Spear and others in the 1970s, and the movement has attracted a following among reggae-loving Americans, Europeans and Asians.
Most of its many sects worship the late Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie, even though he was widely considered a tyrant in his native land and paid little heed to his adulation by faraway Caribbean people whose ancestry tended to be West African and not Ethiopian.
The worship of Selassie is rooted in Jamaican black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey's 1920s prediction that a "black king shall be crowned" in Africa, ushering in a "day of deliverance." When an Ethiopian prince named Ras Tafari, who took the name Haile Selassie I, became emperor in 1930, the descendants of slaves in Jamaica took it as proof that Garvey's prophecy was being fulfilled. When Selassie came to Jamaica in 1966, he was mobbed by cheering crowds, and many Rastafarians insisted miracles and other mystical happenings occurred during his visit.