Some sources question the legitimacy of the placing of Claudius Henry among the Rastafari given his character. Born April 28, 1903, in Coleyville, Manchester, this self-anointed holy man returned to Jamaica from Brooklyn in December 1957 proclaiming he had come to liberate the people and take them back to Africa. At first, no one paid much attention, even when Henry's "Ras Tafarians" swore to decapitate then Premier Norman Manley fhe blocked their way. In 1959 Henry issued a call for all Rastafari to gather in Kingston in anticipation of ships arriving to take them to Africa. Hundreds of Rastafari converged on the city in anticipation of this event. They were advised to shave their locks and beards in preparation for this homeward journey. When the appointed day October 6, 1959 came and passed Henry's prestige was threatened, but it was his activities in connection to subsequent strategies at Repatriation that was to bring him his ultimate national attention. After the police raided Henry's camp and found a cache of firearms and cement-packed conch shells (intended as missiles) the Jamaican authorities decided that the Rev. Claudius Henry was no joke. He was jailed after a letter was found addressed to the recently successful Cuban revolutionaries promising to hand Jamaica over to them.

 

Henry's followers included Henry's son Ronald and ten others from Brooklyn, some of them ex-soldiers. In late June, 1960, an unarmed patrol of British soldiers ran straight into an ambush laid by Ronald and his men, they reportedly surrendered after the first burst of machine-gun fire. The men then ordered them to kneel, and shot at them from short range. Two were killed, the other two wounded. The guerrillas commandeered a truck and headed deeper into the hills. Ronald was later caught and sentenced to death for the murder of the two policemen. Henry too was later caught, tried and imprisoned on charges of treason. This Claudius Henry incident triggered a sequence of events, including extreme ridicule and persecution of Rastafari by the general public and especially the police, and it is in this environment where leaders such as Mortimo Planno would emerge.

 

This generation of leaders inherited a tradition and developed upon it, thus facilitating the further establishment of Rastafari in its range of eclectic expressions.