Rastafari and Bob Marley's Spiritual Testimony

In September 1980, during what would be his final tour of the United States, Bob Marley sat for an interview with Gil Noble, the veteran host of WABC-TV’s long-running Black affairs program “Like It Is.” The conversation, one of the longest and most in-depth Marley ever gave to American television, aired that November, months before the cancer that had already spread through his body took his life in May 1981. It stands as one of the fullest recorded statements of Marley’s own understanding of Rastafari, delivered by the man most responsible for carrying that faith to a global audience.

Rastafari itself did not begin with Marley. It emerged in Jamaica in the early 1930s, in the aftermath of Marcus Garvey’s Pan-Africanist “Back to Africa” organizing of the preceding decade, when a handful of Jamaican preachers began proclaiming that the November 2, 1930, coronation of Ras Tafari Makonnen as Haile Selassie I, Emperor of Ethiopia, fulfilled biblical prophecy identifying him as a divine figure, the returned Messiah for people of African descent. Leonard Howell, who returned to Jamaica from the United States in 1932 and began preaching within months, is generally regarded by historians as the movement’s first and most consequential organizer; he founded the Ethiopian Salvation Society in 1937 and, in 1940, established Pinnacle, the first self-sustaining Rastafari community, in the Jamaican hills. Colonial and later independent Jamaican authorities treated Howell’s preaching as subversive, and he was arrested, institutionalized, and harassed by the state across five decades. Early Rastafari doctrine centered on the divinity of Haile Selassie, the moral corruption of Western colonial society (termed “Babylon”), and the promise of eventual repatriation to Africa, understood as “Zion,” themes that grew directly out of the diaspora’s long history of both forced removal from Africa and organized movements, from Liberia’s founding to Garveyism, to imagine a return.

Bob Marley, born in the rural Jamaican parish of Saint Ann in 1945, encountered Rastafari as a young musician in the ghettos of Kingston in the 1960s, formally adopting the faith and growing dreadlocks after breaking from his mother’s household and, briefly, working factory jobs in the United States. Through the 1970s, as his group the Wailers achieved international stardom, Marley became Rastafari’s most visible and articulate ambassador, weaving its theology, its Amharic and biblical vocabulary, and its politics of Black liberation directly into songs that reached audiences who had never heard of Jamaica’s religious movements. His 1978 performance at the One Love Peace Concert in Kingston, where he brought Jamaica’s two rival political leaders, Michael Manley and Edward Seaga, onto the stage to shake hands above his head, became one of the era’s most iconic demonstrations of music mobilized for reconciliation, rooted explicitly in Rastafari’s language of unity and Jah’s judgment over Babylon’s divisions.

By the time of the Gil Noble interview in 1980, Marley had spent over a decade explaining, in hundreds of interviews, why he understood Haile Selassie’s divinity not as a claim about one distant monarch but as a statement about God’s presence within oppressed people generally, a theology in which, as Rastafari teaching holds, “God is man and man is God.” Marley died on May 11, 1981, at age thirty-six, but reggae had already made Rastafari’s core convictions (African redemption, resistance to oppressive systems, and the dignity of Black identity) recognizable far beyond Jamaica, a legacy that continues to define how the movement is understood worldwide today.