"Nowhere else in the Caribbean or the world had the cultural integrity which Jamaica possessed to give rise to this movement"
OK first let me say I haven't even read further than that line so my comment right now is only about that line. (I will read the rest of the post, but that line just jumped out at me and made me want to comment).
Elder brudda (I am gathering that you are an elder from your profile)... I can overs that JA has a unique place in the movement of Rastafari in this time. And I would agree with you more than with Ras Tyehimba that JA was indeed the site for the genesis of Rastafari as we know it, because the earlier ideas/philosophies/movements that Ras Tyehimba refers to may indeed have been analogous to Rastafari or even virtually the same thing, but they did not go by the name of Rastafari. I can sight your defense of the cultural integrity of Rastafari and the significance of the Emperor although we may have quite different ideas as to what His Imperial Majesty signifies to us. But to say that ONLY Jamaica could POSSIBLY have produced Rastafari because it had more "cultural integrity" than anywhere else in the world? Now that sounds like provincialism my brother. Have you been to every single other place in the caribbean, Africa, Asia, South America, etc., to compare and contrast their "cultural integrity"? How do you measure "cultural integrity"?
Maybe this jumped out at me because I lived for a long time in the USA and as a dread with a West Indian accent everyone assumes you are Jamaican. It's like to them Guyana, Trini, Grenada, etc. don't exist.
No one can take away the great contributions that Jamaica and Jamaicans (or I should say Africans and others in Jamaica) has made to the world... but what about the cultural integrity of, say, Haiti? The first independent Black republic whose people defeated Napoleon? What about the cultural integrity of the Jukka people in Suriname who still speak an African language, still dress, plant, harvest, build in a purely African way? I ain't even gone mention Guyana cos I don't want to sound provincialist myself!
Well that's all I wanted to say, now I will read the rest of the I's post, nuff respeck elder, bless up.