Brother Watson or Bongo Watto was an important part of the urban development of and the institutionalization of Dreadlocks as a feature of Rastafari. He is often identified as one of the first to don that dreadlock style of hair. From as early as 1949, Watto was part of the Youth Black Faith that emerged as a radical thinking branch of the Rastafari youth who wished to establish themselves as being separate from the old ways and part of a new militant ‘warrior' tradition defending the faith. Watto, like his contemporary Planno, had previously been affiliated with Ras Gorgon (an ex-army man) who preached a more activist and radical doctrine than Hibbert and Howell. Watto was therefore a part of that tradition within Rastafari seeking to distance itself from the rituals and traditions of the Revival religion especially with respect to the use of candles and oils in rituals of healing and for the control of good and evil in general. The practice of summoning ancestral spiris to possess individuals was decried as 'Obeah"and

'superstior within the ideas developed around Was. 

 

increasingly Watto and his dreadlock camp in Kingston established itself as an ascetic group of ‘Dreadful' and 'Terrible' warrior priests. These titles constituted a way of presenting their critique of past leadership and offering a new type of serious-mindedness, devotion and uprightness. Bongo Watto as one of the leading thinkers within the Faith was also given the designation of Ras Boanerges or "Son of Thunder". Under the leadership of Watto many of those within the Youth Black Faith later became established as the Nyahbinghi mansion. It is within the Nyahbinghi structure that much of the ritual and doctrinal elaboration of the wider Rastafari family began to take root. This structure introduced ideas about the use of Ganja as sacrament, dreadlocks as a marker of separation and resistance, the duty of the Nyahbinghi ritual as the foundation of Rastafari spirituality, and the development of