Leonard Howell

Leonard Percival Howell was born on 16 June 1898 in Red Hills, Clarendon, Jamaica, the eldest of eleven children, and travelled abroad for years as a young man, reportedly serving in West Africa, before returning to Jamaica in the early 1930s.

Following the 1930 coronation of Haile Selassie I as Emperor of Ethiopia, Howell became one of the principal founders of the Rastafari movement, preaching that Selassie was the returned Messiah and developing a theology centred on African redemption and anti-colonial resistance.

In 1934 Howell was arrested and tried for sedition at the Morant Bay Courthouse for refusing to recognise King George V as his sovereign, delivering the first public defence of Rastafari belief in a Jamaican court, and while imprisoned he wrote The Promised Key, the first text on Rastafari theology.

In 1940 Howell purchased a 500-acre property in St Catherine that became known as Pinnacle, building it into a self-sufficient commune of craftsmen, farmers and Rastafari adherents that at its peak housed as many as 1,600 residents and operated its own internal economy.

Jamaican authorities raided Pinnacle repeatedly between 1941 and its final, most destructive raid in 1954, and though the commune was ultimately dismantled, its displaced residents carried Rastafari beliefs across Jamaica and eventually the world; Howell died in 1981, the same year as Bob Marley, and was posthumously awarded Jamaica's Order of Distinction in 2022.