The police force had been target-training with pictures of Rastafari for years, so when Bustamante finally gave them the power to drag Rastas away at gunpoint, many Rasta bredren did not make it back home. The police captured hundreds of Rastas and forcibly shaved their precepts and cut their dreadlocks. They jailed, tortured, and injured as many as 150 Rastafari, and killed an unknown number of Rasta bredren. Soon after this, ‘Babylon’ came to permanently replace the word for ‘police’ in Jamaican patois. I was never taught one word of this in school; the massacre has been all but erased from
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