Howell, known as the First Rasta, lived peacefully at Pinnacle with an estimated three thousand other Rastas, preaching Black independence and togetherness. But the Jamaican government, still under British rule, thought his brand of transgression dangerous; an empowered Black majority would mean revolution. In 1954, Babylon raided Pinnacle’s ganja fields and seized their five hundred acres of land and money, claiming Howell’s Rasta commune was a cult, and set fire to the anti-colonial movement by reframing the Rastafari as agents of dread, as madmen, as child-killers, as the Blackheart Man.
