Exodus! Heirs and Pioneers, Rastafari Return to Ethiopia

Description

In 1977, Bob Marley composed Exodus, a reggae masterpiece that evokes the return of Rastafari to Africa. Over the past 50 years, Rastafari have made the journey to Ethiopia, settling in the country as ""repatriates"". This little-known history is told in Exodus! Heirs and Pioneers, Rastafari Return to Ethiopia. Giulia Bonacci recounts, with sharpness and rigor, this amazing journey of Rastafari who left the Caribbean, the United States of America and the United Kingdom. Exiting from the Babylon of the West and entering the Zion that is Ethiopia, the exodus has a Pan-African dimension that is significant to the present day. Despite facing complex challenges in their relations with the Ethiopian state and its people, mystical and determined Rastafari keep arriving to Shashemene, their Promised Land.

Revealing personal trajectories, Giulia Bonacci shows that Rastafari were not the first black settlers in Ethiopia. She tracks the history of return over the decades, demonstrating that the utopian idea of return is also a reality. Exodus! is based on in-depth archival and print research, as well as on a wide range of oral histories collected in Ethiopia, Jamaica, Ghana and the USA. Previously unseen photographs illustrate the book.

Bibliography

Giulia Bonacci is a historian of Africa and its Diasporas. She is a researcher at the Institute of Research for Development (IRD) in France. Her research on the Back to Africa movement, the social history of Pan Africanism and the Rastafari movement has taken her to many sites around the Black Atlantic. In addition to using the classical materials of history (archives, prints, maps and photographs), she has undertaken extensive collection of oral histories, in French, English, and Amharic. She has edited and coordinated books and special issues of periodicals. In addition, she has published many scholarly papers, as well as worked in cultural and musical journalism.

Foreword by Professor Elikia M'Bokolo, Research Director at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (France), and Professor of History at the Universite de Kinshasa (DRC).