Ras Tafari

When an Ethiopian prince named Ras Tafari, who took the name Haile Selassie I, became emperor in 1930, the descendants of the enslaved in Jamaica took it as proof that Garvey’s prophecy was being fulfilled.

When an Ethiopian prince named Ras Tafari, who took the name Haile Selassie I, became emperor in 1930, the descendants of slaves in Jamaica took it as proof that Garvey’s prophecy was being fulfilled.

In 1924, Ras Tafari visited the Armenian monastery in Jerusalem, where he met a group of 40 children who had been orphaned by the mass killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turks during World War One.

So, when a black man called Ras Tafari was crowned in Ethiopia, many saw that as a sign the prophecy had come true.

“Prince Ras Tafari adopted 40 Armenian orphans from Jerusalem to be the first imperial band,” said Aramazt Kalayjian, a documentary filmmaker working on a film about the Armenian community in Ethiopia.