What Reggae got wrong about Ethiopia

From the first memory of music, reggae rhythms have been planted within my mind more than any other noise. There is something about how it sways, something in the slow, confident swing that caught hold of me. The riddim, which was very much in the Somali Dhaanto style and mimicked the camel’s dignified, dandified walk, rocked my heart into quiet. Its groove was honeyed and close, its basslines heavy. Even when I didn’t understand the words, reggae music imbued my fidgety teen brain with an attitude of ease and toughness. I enjoyed it before I had any idea what it was trying to say. 

From my mother’s first mention of Bob Marley’s “Get Up, Stand Up” which, she told me, was among the foreign tunes that fared well among the liberation fronts during the civil war; to the trance-like build-up in “Natural Mystic” which we would simply refer to as “Tii is dallacaysay” or “the one that grows loud,” from the wise owl in Alpha Blondy’s humanist songs shouting disillusionment with the consumerist system; to Haile Roots’ personification of reggae that not only hails Ethiopia, but also hails from it. 

Luciano’s guest verse on Haile Roots’ “Ethiopia,” waving the Ethiopian flag with the Lion of Judah in the centre, singing “we are the chosen ones, who sing redemption songs, who keep that red, gold and green flying high and strong,” and to top the verse, Haile Roots enters with the chorus which closes with “O Ethiopia, look up” in honour of one of the most utilised biblical lines in reggae music: “Ethiopia shall stretch forth her hands unto God.” It was my favourite verse of the whole album. Later, when I discovered that many in Ethiopia itself do not equate that emblem with the “love” the song all but sings about, I was surprised. 

The more I listened, the more I began hearing the message of the riddim; words like Babylon, Zion, Selassie I, and Ethiopia came up time and again. There were songs that sang the praises of Emperor Haile Selassie as the “conquering lion of the tribe of Judah,” the messiah returned. Then I realised that most reggae songs did not just entertain but preached also. It was a means of philosophy, and said philosophy was Rastafarianism. That’s where it got complicated. 

Rastafarianism is not so much a religion as a history, a wound, a longing clothed in spiritual idiom. Born of Jamaica’s ghettos, in the hearts of the poor and disenfranchised there, the majority of whom were descendants of slaves, it arose out of the deep psychic displacement of Blacks who were scattered around the Atlantic. What reggae provided me with, ultimately, was not so much music, but a window into the dislocation, and the dream that arose therefrom. 

The verse “Ethiopia shall stretch forth her hands unto God” (Psalm 68:31) was heard by their ears as prophecy and embraced by their hungry hearts. 

To truly understand reggae, you must trace back to the story that gave it life — the story of Africans torn from their homelands, beaten and broken into new lives and then handed a Bible by the men who owned them. Yes, the Bible was meant to pacify them, but it became a tool of hope. The slaves found themselves in its words, not just in its commandments, but in its stories. They found their own bondage in the Israelites’ slavery in Egypt and, as did the Israelites in their time, they searched for a Moses. 

The verse “Ethiopia shall stretch forth her hands unto God” (Psalm 68:31) was heard by their ears as prophecy and embraced by their hungry hearts. It was to them that Africa, and particularly Ethiopia, was not just a place but a symbol of pride, of a godly home free from white domination. 

From that seed, a theology called Ethiopianism sprouted long before Rastafarianism. Black churches, particularly in the Americas, took on such names as the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. Their message was simple: God is not white. And salvation will not be brought from Europe. 

Enter Marcus Garvey, Jamaican Black nationalist and prophet of pan-Africanism, who gave shape to that craving. Garvey instructed race pride, solidarity, and going back to Africa, and in firestorm orations throughout the Black Atlantic, he exhorted people to “look to Africa, when a Black king shall be crowned, for the day of deliverance is at hand.” Whether or not he ever did say so very exactly is beside the point compared to the fact that the words were conceived, they were shared, they were written down and remembered. 

And then, in 1930, Ras Tafari Makonnen was crowned Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia. 

 They called themselves “Rastas,” taking from Haile Selassie’s pre-coronation title: Ras for “prince” or “head,” Tafari for “the one who is feared.” 

It was less of a coronation and more of a revelation to most of them. Here was a Black king, lineage-d back, they said, to Solomon’s line and the Queen of Sheba, ruling over a nation that had never been colonised. Which, for the Black Jamaican, Harlemite, Trinidadian, and London street kid, felt like the fulfilment of prophecy. 

Rastafarianism was conceived not just as a religion, but as something to hold onto for people long denied their cultural heritage. They called themselves “Rastas,” taking from Haile Selassie’s pre-coronation title: Ras for “prince” or “head,” Tafari for “the one who is feared.” To others, becoming Rasta was more than homage to a name; it was the recovery of dignity and the declaration that Blackness, so long debased, was royal. They did not merely behold a king in Haile Selassie but beheld the living God and the second coming of Christ, not come back as a spirit wafting in the clouds but as a Black man on earth.  

 This was not religion. It was healing. It was believing they were more than the world had told them they were. And… reggae was the sound of this faith. 

Haile Selassie responded to the affection in which he was held by Rastafarians by granting them land in Shashamene after regaining his throne at the end of the Second World War. The Emperor allocated 500 acres to “black people of the world”, which began attracting Rastafarians following his visit to Jamaica in the mid-1960s. 

So, Ethiopia became Zion, the promised land, the embodiment of goodness and hope. And the West, the colonial empires that enslaved and dehumanised them, became Babylon, the embodiment of corruption. It was no longer a fantasy of liberty for these people to return to Africa but a religious concept, and they grew their dreadlocks not as a trend, but as revolt and protest against Babylonian standards. They wore their hair like lions did. They ate only pure foods, following the Ital way, to keep their bodies pure and spiritually harmonious. Even their speech changed. “I and I” replaced “me and you,” a spoken dialect that dispelled barriers between people, speaking in a divine singularity. 

This was not just a religion. It was healing. It was believing they were more than the world had told them they were. And… reggae was the sound of this faith. 

When Bob Marley sang “Exodus! Movement of Jah people,” it was not just a verse, but it was also theology, history, and politics in beats. Reggae was music of a people wanting to reposition themselves in the world. No longer slaves, or children of slaves, but Israelites now. Chosen. And their king arrived. 

 Though Haile Selassie is justifiably revered on the world stage for his role in Pan-Africanism, his backing of liberation struggles, his opposition to Italian fascism, and assisting in the creation of the Organisation of African Unity, his legacy at home is quite another matter. 

As I continued reading, I discovered that the Ethiopia and Haile Selassie I of reggae history were not historically true at all. 

Ironically, Ethiopia, long revered as an icon of African dignity and resistance, was in fact created neither in unity nor freedom, but through imperial violence. The modern-day Ethiopian nation-state grew as Abyssinian emperors like Menelik II and later Haile Selassie himself expanded their territories southward, incorporating diverse nations like the Oromo, Sidama, Somali, and others by military might and through forced assimilation. Though Haile Selassie is justifiably revered on the world stage for his role in Pan-Africanism, his backing of liberation struggles, his opposition to Italian fascism, and assisting in the creation of the Organisation of African Unity, his legacy at home is quite another matter. 

“Until the philosophy which holds one race superior, and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned… War,” sang Bob Marley, inspired by Haile Selassie’s 1963 UN speech acclaiming the king as a prophet and defender of human rights and anti-racism. 

However, Haile Selassie not only continued but institutionalised the cultural assimilation policy and exploitative land tenure of his predecessors. Native languages were banned in schools, the media, and government, and cities and towns were renamed in Amharic in an effort to eradicate local identities; something debated openly as “Amharization” in African studies, in line with other cultural assimilations such as the Arabisation in North Africa and Francisation in West Africa. Because of this, it was also very common to find people of other ethnic groups presenting themselves as Amhara just to gain simple rights like the right to education. 

Political repression was also prevalent; dissidents were imprisoned or killed and communities silenced. His government responded to dissent through violence, like the violent suppression of rebellions such as the 1960s Bale Oromo rebellion, where thousands were killed and displaced. 

“Jah love is for the poor,” warbles Damian Marley with brother Stephen in “The Mission.” 

But during the disastrous Wollo famine of the early 1970s, while peasants died of hunger in tens of thousands, Selassie concealed the emergency and toured Europe, displaying a mask of imperial dignity. 

“The king of that land, which is far away, 
His name is King Selassie 
King of Kings and Lord of Lords, 
The king of that land, which is in the east.” 

Culture bursts out in their faithful hymn to Ethiopia’s capital, praising it as the epitome of African pride and Haile Selassie’s imperial lineage. 

 Rastas view Ethiopia as Zion, a sacred homeland and refuge from Babylonian domination, yet ironically, the Ethiopia they venerate was, for most of its people, a symbol of conquest and not deliverance. 

But underlying this accolade is suppressed history that reminds us that the soil on which Addis Ababa originally arose was owned by the Tulama Oromo, who named it Finfinne, a sacred land of hot springs and livestock herding. In the late 19th century, Emperor Menelik II confiscated this soil in the course of his military campaigns southward, forcibly annexing it into the growing empire of Ethiopia. The Oromo were not merely displaced but often reduced to gabbar — serfs who toiled under feudal structures of power that enriched northern nobility and imperial elites. Rastas view Ethiopia as Zion, a sacred homeland and refuge from Babylonian domination, yet ironically, the Ethiopia they venerate was, for most of its people, a symbol of conquest and not deliverance. The territory that symbolises redemption to Rastafarians was, in itself, created by conquest, not consensus. 

The majority of Ethiopians did not see Selassie as a saviour but instead saw him as a distant ruler of an elite who was indebted to Europe. Ethiopian elites of the royal class used to reject identification with the colonised continent. They upheld imperial tradition and understood Blackness differently than the people of Jamaica did. 

This is the paradox: the man who is seen as a god by the oppressed in Jamaica is remembered by so many back home as an emperor of an encroaching empire. 

The fall of Haile Selassie in 1974 was, to me, the clearest proof of who he truly was. A man worshipped as divine and redeemer of Black people, yet overthrown by his own Black people as he was quietly smothered by a military junta and buried beneath the palace he once ruled.  

I sat watching a show called Devil’s Advocate by Darcus Howe on Haile Selassie, and I couldn’t understand how the Rasta priest could dogmatically proclaim Selassie to be divine as people close to the king, like his second cousin and a high priest during his time, testified against their claims. 

 I loved the musicality of reggae but morally object to most of the messages the songs try to preach, namely those so-called “conscious” ones. 

And while Selassie’s second cousin explained how Selassie’s body was exhumed from the ground decades later, the Rastas would not believe that he died. They saw him as having disappeared, replaced, or chosen to leave. I couldn’t help but sit with the paradox. Rastafarianism, based on the gruesome suffering of Black people in the West, was a natural thing then — how could they not want to believe in a Black messiah, Africa as saviour?  

But their inability to see the suffering that Selassie brought to others — the silenced ones, the starved ones, the erased ones — makes me uneasy. It illustrates how history, being comprehended solely by hope or pain, may be distorted. It transforms tyranny into heroism and makes us oblivious to the suffering of those beyond our own story. There, I found myself in the womb of a paradox; a paradox born out of the conflict between form and content. I loved the musicality of reggae but morally object to most of the messages the songs try to preach, namely those so-called “conscious” ones. 

I still bob my head and tap into the relaxed vibe when I feel a good riddim hailing Jah Rastafari, but I am immediately filled with a guilt I cannot shake off, a guilt brought about by not forgetting the suffering the music invites me to overlook.