When Howell built Pinnacle, the largest-ever Rasta commune and a peaceful self-sustaining society, the British government razed it to the ground, staunching the movement’s message of unity and Black independence. They were the unemployed and unemployable, the constant victims of state violence and brutality, the ones the government jailed and forcibly shaved, the ones brutally beaten by the police. In 1963, when a group of Rastas refused to relinquish the farmlands they lived on to government seizure, Alexander Bustamante, the white prime minister then, ordered the military to “Bring in all
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