Revisiting the legendary Rastafari community of Ethiopia

Fol­low­ing Italy’s resound­ing defeat at the Bat­tle of Gondar, Emper­or Haile Selassie I returned to the throne with a new vision for Ethiopia. He would cre­ate Land Grants for peo­ple of the African dias­po­ra, ful­fill­ing the prophe­cy of Jamaican polit­i­cal activist Mar­cus Gar­vey who lead the Back to Africa move­ment of the 1920s.

Believ­ing Haile Selassie to be the Mes­si­ah (“Jah”), Garvey’s fol­low­ers adopt­ed his pre-coro­na­tion name, Ras Tafari Makon­nen, to describe the phi­los­o­phy by which they would live free from Baby­lon (the West).

In 1955, the Emper­or bestowed the first Land Grant to all Caribbean peo­ple of African descent who want­ed to ​“come home”. A decade lat­er, the exo­dus began as Rasta­far­i­an set­tlers embarked on an epic voy­age of return to Shashe­mane, a 17 square km vil­lage nes­tled deep with­in the ancient Rift Val­ley, some 250 km south of Addis Ababa. 

Fol­low­ing the Derg Rev­o­lu­tion and Selassie’s assas­si­na­tion in 1975, the Mengis­tu Haile Mari­am gov­ern­ment con­fis­cat­ed the land but allowed the peo­ple to con­tin­ue to live as they had been. Although lit­tle was known of their lives, the myth­ic image of Shashe­mane remained a bea­con of promise in the West.

Eng­lish pho­tog­ra­ph­er and jour­nal­ist Derek Bish­ton first learned of Shashe­mane in the late 1970s while work­ing run­ning a com­mu­ni­ty pub­lish­ing and design work­shop in Handsworth, Birm­ing­ham, from local youth who rec­og­nized them­selves in Rasta­far­i­an­ism and the Back to Africa movement.

While speak­ing with a pic­ture edi­tor at the Sun­day Times Mag­a­zine one day in 1981, Bish­ton tossed out an idea: a sto­ry on Shashe­mane. They advanced him £500 on the spot and Bish­ton set off on a jour­ney that would lat­er become Black­heart Man — A Jour­ney Into Ras­ta, a pow­er­ful col­lec­tion of pho­tographs and first per­son accounts of the lives of a peo­ple com­mit­ted to build­ing a new world first pub­lished in 1986.

Long out of print, Bish­ton returned to his archive for Rasta­fari in the Promised Land 1981 (Café Roy­al Books), which pairs selec­tions from the orig­i­nal book with images made upon his return in 2013.

Bish­ton points to the pho­to­graph of Noël Dyer, a radi­ant soul doing laun­dry by hand with a live­ly ele­gance that makes his sto­ry all the more sub­lime. Born in Jamaica, Dyer was a mem­ber of the Win­drush Gen­er­a­tion who had come to rebuild Britain after the war only to encounter sys­temic racism had poi­soned the well.

“Noël con­vert­ed to Rasta­fari in the ear­ly 1960s, worked for a few years to save some mon­ey, and then decid­ed, ​‘Right, I’m off to Ethiopia’, and he lit­er­al­ly left a South Lon­don with just the clothes he had on his back, more or less, and £5,” Bish­ton says. ​“He knew that that if he got to the coast of North Africa all he had to do was turn left, walk until he got to the Nile, walk down and fol­low the White Nile into Ethiopia.”

Dur­ing his trip, Dyer taught him­self to read by study­ing the Bible against his mem­o­ry of Psalms he had learned. ​“It changed my per­cep­tion of what it was real­ly all about,” Bish­ton says. ​“He poured out his sto­ry to me, because he was so pleased find­ing out some­one who want­ed to under­stand his moti­va­tion, his beliefs, and what he’d gone through to get there. And I think that’s true of a lot of peo­ple that I spoke to.”

Since Bishton’s first vis­it, Shashe­mane has blos­somed into a thriv­ing com­mu­ni­ty, show­ing it is pos­si­ble to live free from Baby­lon. While many of the peo­ple he met have since died, Bish­ton main­tains rela­tion­ships with their fam­i­lies and chil­dren, keep­ing their mem­o­ries alive in his pho­tographs and their words.

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