The Emergence of the Political Rastafarian through Ras Samuel L Brown

Ras Political: The Emergence of the Political Rastafarian through Ras Samuel L Brown

In the 1920s, Marcus Mosiah Garvey preached a rhetoric of pan-Africanism, and of a Jamaican exodus to the homeland of Africa. One young and impressionable Jamaican, Samuel Brown was touched and motivated by Garveyism, and his self-taught schooling eventually laid a great foundation for a cohesive Rastafarian sect through political action.

Although Rastafarians are a typically non-political group of people, some followers are schooled in the science of the Political, and some Rastas even hold elected positions in local, state, and national legislatures. Rastas, as citizens of any nation, are subject to those nations’ laws and regulations, in many cases there are laws specifically regarding their rights and freedoms both positively and negatively. Reggae, the oft-adopted audio/visual representation of Rastafarianism, is rooted in the political; with cries for freedom, demands of reform, and the call to action, and has been an important aspect of many of the last four decades’ of Jamaican elections. Over the last seventy years, the Movement has been drastically shaped by many factors, some of which were both externally and internally political. The last seventy years, with these many influences, Rastafarianism has evolved into a reality far removed from the expectations of, and possibly desires of its founding leaders. Samuel Brown, touched by Marcus Garvey was one of these founding leaders, an inherently political and important early Rasta.

Ras Sam, as he was known to the brethren was born into the Rastafarian movement, in the Trelawny area in 1925, and was reported to have been met by Marcus Mosiah Garvey at the age of five, while little Samuel Brown was attending a political rally with his mother.

His mother’s political activities embedded in Sam an understanding of the importance of politically derived power, and although not formally trained due to his family’s extreme poverty, he was apparently ‘brilliant’. A devout Rasta, Sam Brown was also a powerful and provocative speaker, and over his forty-year career Ras Sam made speeches at the Smithsonian, the University of Vermont, and many Rastafarian International Conferences.

During the 1960s Ras Sam lead a group of Rastas at the Back-o-Wall Rastafarian Movement Recruitment Center camp near Denham Town, near his friend Prince Emmanuel’s African National Congress camp. Both were subsequently raided and destroyed by the police in 1966, a move which resulted in negative impacts towards the Rastas by the neighboring squatters, whose homes were also destroyed in the raid.