In this beautiful play on words, Joe Ruglass, the poet, folk-song composer, and flutist who has for years played with the Mystic Revelation of Rastafari, begins his poem that expresses the Rastafari rejection of Jamaica as a homeland and their yearnings for repatriation. The Rastafari ever since the movement's rise in the early 1930s have held to the belief that they and all Africans in the diaspora are but exiles in 'Babylon,' destined to be delivered out of captivity by a return to 'Zion,' that is, Africa, the land of our ancestors, or Ethiopia, the sear of Jah, Ras Tafari himself, Emperor Haile Selassie's precoronation name.
Repatriation is one of the corner-stones of Rastafari belief.
The fact that the majority of Jamaicans, including most of those who migrate, regard Jamaica as their home might make the position of Joe Ruglass and the other tens of thousands of the Rastafari seem very sectarian. The truth is , however, that the doctrine of repatriation is kindred to a lineage of ideas and forms of action four hundred years old. They arose first in response to European slavery and then, following emancipation, in response to the system of social, cultural, and economic oppression on which modern Jamaica was built. Of all the contemporary autonomous groups that together make up what we know as the Rastafari movement, the Bobo exhibit the highest intensity of Revivalism. Unlike other Dreadlocks, most Bobo live together in a commune, organized in the tradition of Howell, and circumscribed by rituals.