The 1948 Grant

Shashamane exists because of one specific act. In 1948, Emperor Haile Selassie I granted roughly five hundred acres of land in the Shashamane district of Ethiopia's Oromia region to the Ethiopian World Federation, an organization founded in 1937 to support Ethiopia during the Italian occupation, for use by members of the African diaspora who wished to return. The grant predates Rastafari's own emergence as an organized religion in Jamaica by only a few years, and it would become, once word of it reached the Caribbean, the movement's central geographic anchor: the place repatriation itself pointed toward.

Settlement grew slowly through the 1950s and accelerated after Selassie's own 1966 state visit to Jamaica, remembered by Rastafari as Grounation Day, drew far wider attention to Ethiopia as a living rather than symbolic destination. Jamaican, Trinidadian, Barbadian, American and British Rastafari made the journey through the following decades, building a genuinely mixed diaspora community on the granted land rather than a single national enclave. Erin MacLeod's research, built on more than ninety interviews conducted primarily in Shashamane, centers not on the settlers' own account of the place but on how Ethiopians themselves have received and understood this unusual immigrant community living inside their country on the strength of an emperor's decades old land grant.