Leonard Howell

Leonard Percival Howell (1898–1981), known as “The Gong” and “The First Rasta”, was among Jamaica’s earliest Rastafari preachers. The farming and religious community he founded at Pinnacle in 1940 became an important centre of early Rastafari life. Ganja was grown alongside food crops, linking the community’s livelihood and religious identity to a plant colonial law prohibited.

His prominence should not erase other early teachers, including Joseph Hibbert, Archibald Dunkley and Robert Hinds. Howell became especially influential through the community he organised and the opposition his preaching provoked.

Preacher and prisoner

Howell returned to Jamaica in 1932 after years abroad, including Panama and New York. His preaching presented Haile Selassie, crowned emperor of Ethiopia in 1930, as divine and challenged colonial authority and racial subordination.

In 1934 he was imprisoned for sedition. His tract The Promised Key, published under the name G. G. Maragh, set out teachings that challenged established churches and colonial rule. The legal conflict concerned anti-colonial preaching as well as later cannabis enforcement; it was not simply a prosecution for using ganja.

Howell did not wear dreadlocks. His appearance in a suit and tie is consistent with the public figure recorded in accounts of early Rastafari, rather than the visual shorthand often attached to the movement today.

Building Pinnacle

In 1940 Howell established Pinnacle near Sligoville in the hills of St Catherine. Residents farmed and traded, seeking a measure of independence from the institutions that excluded or pursued them.

Michael Barnett’s study describes food production and ganja as a cash crop supporting the community. Cannabis belonged to the settlement’s economy as well as its developing Rastafari culture. Pinnacle was a place of everyday work and communal life, not merely a symbolic retreat.

Raids and dispersal

Jamaica had prohibited ganja in 1913. In 1941 the colony made imprisonment mandatory for ganja offences, while police raided Pinnacle and arrested residents. The raids brought the community’s cultivation into direct conflict with colonial enforcement.

The major 1954 raid destroyed dwellings and cannabis crops and drove residents away. Some returned, so describing that year as the community’s single, final ending is too simple.

Barnett also records Monty Howell’s account of a final eviction in 1958, based on a June 2020 interview. This is a son’s retrospective testimony, distinct from a contemporary police record. Together, the accounts describe repeated disruption and eventual dispersal rather than an intact village disappearing in one operation.

Displaced residents moved to nearby settlements and west Kingston. Pinnacle’s influence continued through them, and communal ganja use became associated with Rastafari beyond the original settlement. The broader religious practice is described in the Rastafari sacrament.

Remembering the individual

Howell died in Kingston in 1981. Jamaica posthumously awarded him the Order of Distinction in 2022, and campaigns for fuller recognition continue alongside disputes over Pinnacle’s heritage.

The portrait reproduced by WiredJA shows Howell himself in formal clothing. Its original photographer, capture date and restoration history are unverified, so the reproduction is not dated circa 1940. His enduring place in cannabis history rests on the documented community and its encounters with prohibition, rather than on an assumed date for this image.^{[1][2][3][4][5]}