Pinnacle

May 6, 2024
Howell debuts with an erratic portrait of his father, Rasta movement founder Leonard Percival Howell (1898–1981), and the Rastafarian community he led near Kingston, Jamaica, from 1940 until it was disbanded in the late ’50s. Howell frames his childhood in the Pinnacle compound as idyllic, and the residents there as good citizens, claiming that the friction between Howell’s followers and other Jamaicans stemmed largely from harassment by colonial authorities who sought to undercut Howell’s influence. Interwoven with the story of the commune is valuable background on Rastafarianism’s origins in Marcus Garvey’s movement for African independence, from which it broke in the early 1930s when Howell designated Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie I as “the Living God.” Unfortunately, the author’s alternately defensive and worshipful attitude toward his father yields some questionable conclusions, as when Howell writes of his father’s many romantic relationships, “one could argue Dada loved women too much to respect them, but he was a man of his times.... He was a Victorian gentleman and a lion all in one.” This falls short.

June 1, 2024
A son of one of the founders of the Rastafarian movement tells the inside story of the utopian village his father founded and the colonial forces that ultimately destroyed it. Born and raised at Pinnacle, Howell had the unique opportunity to witness the events surrounding this first-ever Rasta community's rise and fall. Working alongside his father's biographer, Lee, the author offers insights into Leonard Howell (1898-1981), the man who founded the commune, and the troubled history of Pinnacle itself. Toward the end of World War I, Leonard left Jamaica to fight for England. Then he split time between Panama and New York City, where he met Black intellectuals like Marcus Garvey, who inspired him to create a pro-African belief system that extended divinity to Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie. Upon returning to Jamaica in the 1930s, Leonard earned a reputation among members of the Jamaican establishment as a radical who "advised poor people to start working together to build their own society." Preaching "peace and love," Leonard, who was at different times jailed and thrown into a psychiatric hospital for his beliefs, founded Pinnacle as a refuge for those who followed his beliefs. Built on the grounds of an old colonial estate, Pinnacle was a place where "everybody lived comfortably." Fruit and fish were plentiful, and drumming and singing were a part of everyday life. However, peace was elusive. Fearing Leonard's growing influence on the poor and dispossessed, procolonial Jamaican government forces did everything in their power--from invalidating his purchase of Pinnacle lands to subjecting him and Pinnacle to periodic police harassment--to lay waste to a thriving Rasta community. Illustrated throughout with black-and-white photographs, this loving tribute will appeal to historians of Jamaica and the Caribbean, as well as anyone with an interest in the origins of Rastafarian culture. An instructive and enlightening book.

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