"I tell you, Mon, dis place here, deres nothin’ fe us ta do here in Nine Miles".

"I and I jus’ work dese hard fields of Babylon for smawl money".

"An’ Bob was right, ya know it’s all about respect, mon. Dey done wan’ us ever to go back to Africa".

A silence then descended as his eyes glazed over, his speech slowed and the perfumes of some nearby flowering plants mixed with the sweet aroma of ‘ganga’ he was smoking. For a while he looked at me, calculating, measuring me up as he slowly inhaled again and continued,

 "Ya know Mon, Bob himself wrote da song ‘Three Little Birds’ restin’ on dat very rock you are sitting on’

I had arrived by taxi at the hilltop hamlet of Nine Miles, high in the green foothills of St. Ann’s Parish in one of the remotest parts of Jamaica. It was a late July morning and I had come to pay my respects at the graveside where Bob Marley had been finally laid to rest. My journey had brought me deep into the Jamaican countryside to a special place where the spirits of runaway African slaves still lingered and the white limestone caves still echoed with the cries of the ‘maroons’ who once hid from the British forces who hunted them. The Arawak Indians had first called this place ‘Xaymaca’, meaning the ‘land of wood and water’ and when Christopher Columbus took possession of the island, he said, "that it was the fairest isle that eyes have beheld". But generations had come and gone and with each passing day, the island had developed its own traditions and beliefs and now when the wind blew along the mountainside, it carried the soul of Africa.

In 1739, after nearly a century of struggle, the runway slaves secured their freedom from the British, but it was to be another two and a half centuries before the rest of the citizens on the island were given independence. Over that period African beliefs developed and in the early part of the twentieth century, somewhere in the hills of eastern Jamaica, the cult Rastafarianism sprang up offering a life of abstinence, a shield of the religion's followers against the Jamaican government, which they referred to as Babylon. The 1930s were years of social upheaval and labour unrest on the island led to the vicious suppression and deaths of striking sugar-cane workers, giving the Rastafarians the perfect context to divorce themselves from the oppressive white system. The cult then became a religion of the black dispossessed and the ‘dreads’, as Rastafarians became known, spilled out of the eastern hills into the ghettos of west Kingston, believing that their salvation lay not in a white man’s heaven in the sky, but back in Africa. They vowed that at a secret hour known only to a devout few, they would return to Ethiopia by an undisclosed means, leaving behind the island of Jamaica, their Hell on Earth. Until that time, Rastas decided to refuse to take part in the commerce of ‘Babylon’, which they considered the sphere of temporal captivity of the spirit.
At the heart of the new Rastafarian religion lay elements of Judaism and Christianity and many mysteries, which were taken from the Egyptian Book of the Dead. It is known that Paul the Apostle once converted an Ethiopian eunuch to Christianity. The man was also a high-placed, respected rabbi of Orthodox Judaism and when he returned to Ethiopia, he started the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. Rastafarians acknowledge that their religion is the blending of Judaism and Christianity and accept its Egyptian origins, although they reject the alleged ‘Babylonian hypocrisy’ of the modern church. The Church of Rome is considered to be particularly Babylonian and many members mention that Mussolini, a citizen of that city, invaded the Holy Land of Ethiopia in 1935. They believe that Ras Tafari is the 225th king and directly descended from King David, who, in turn, was descended from Moses. Before his visit in 1966, Emperor Haile Selassie established a branch of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church on the island.

Religions are often known to reflect the social and geographical environment, out of which they emerge and Jamaican Rastafaris use a particular potent strain of marijuana, which grows freely on the island as a sacrament and aid to meditation. In fact, their leaders urged that ‘ganga’ be smoked as a religious rite and allege that it was found growing on the grave of King Solomon. They even cite biblical passages, such as Psalms 104:14, to defer their illegality and testify to the herb’s sacramental properties: "He causeth the grass to grow for the cattle, and herb for the service of man, that he may bring forth food out of the earth." Sets of dietary and hygienic laws were formulated to accompany the religion's doctrine, making the ingestion of alcohol, tobacco, meat, shellfish, scaleless fish, snails, predatory and scavenger species of marine life forbidden. They also outlawed the combing or cutting of hair, allowing it to grow until it twists and mats into sun-reddened locks that sometimes dangle below the waist, citing the holy directive in Leviticus 21:5: "They shall not make baldness upon their head, neither shall they shave off the corner of their beard, nor make any cuttings in their flesh."

I looked at him again, as his eyes glazed further and the plaintive words of a Bob Marley drifted from his tape recorder, which balanced on a rock in the background. He sang,

"The road of life is rocky

And you may stumble too

So while you point your fingers

Someone else is judgin' you

Love your brotherman"