Rastafari reasonings on Africa in historical perspective

At a time when the global north is increasingly concerned about African migration to Europe and beyond, the initiative of the Government of Ghana to declare 2019 as the Year of Return to Africa, actually conferring Ghanaian citizenship on many returnees, might have been surprising. And yet there are an estimated 5000 to 7000 returnees of African descent in Ghana alone. What motivates them? Some of the answers to this question can be found among the Rastafari movement. Emerging in the colonial Jamaica of the 1930s, Rastafarians were drawing on a long history of biblical identifications with Africa (known as Ethiopianism) to counter the colonial demonization of the continent of their ancestors. Identifying their biblical expectations with Ras Tafari, who was crowned Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia in 1930, the Rastafarians have become the most prominent returnees of African descent to their ancestral homeland. The proposed research project will therefore trace this continuous identification with Africa and longing for a return to Africa among Rastafarians, why it has emerged and how it has developed over time. The hypothesis of the project is that the answers to these questions lie in Rastafarian spiritual philosophy about Africa, which is expressed in their so-called reasonings and has had to accommodate the actual Africa more and more since Rastafarian contacts with the continent were established in the 1960s. Concerning methods, the project will therefore establish a comprehensive corpus of Rastafarian reasonings on Africa comprised by published texts in various forms but also documented as the result of participant observation and qualitative interviews. These will be conducted at events organised by Rastafarian repatriation initiatives in Jamaica, St. Lucia, Ethiopia, Tanzania or Ghana and will then be subjected to a discourse analysis. The innovativeness of the project lies in adding African History Studies, Development Studies, Mobility Studies and History of Religions perspectives to the existing emphasis of Anthropology, Sociology and Caribbean Studies within Rastafari scholarship. These currently underrepresented perspectives will allow the project to take the self-identification of Rastafarians as Africans within their biblical cosmology seriously and thus allow us to better understand their reasonings on Africa.