The Day the Crowd Would Not Let Him Land

Whatever Rastafari houses hold about the nature of Selassie's divinity, the closest the movement came to a collective encounter with the claim happened on a single afternoon. Selassie made a state visit to Jamaica on 21 April 1966, and the crowd that gathered at the airport, estimated at well over a hundred thousand, was large and unmanageable enough that the emperor's plane could not safely open its doors onto the usual mobile stairway, accounts describing the crowd rushing the tarmac and Jamaican authorities asking Ras Mortimer Planno, a recognised Rastafari elder, to climb aboard and persuade Selassie it was safe to descend. Selassie is remembered as having stepped off the plane without using the red carpet laid out for him, choosing instead to walk directly onto the ground, and Rastafari read the gesture as deliberate, the emperor making contact with the soil rather than being kept from it by ceremony built for an ordinary head of state. The date is kept today as Grounation Day, among the most widely observed dates on the Rastafari calendar, and the name itself records what the crowd took the gesture to mean. None of this settled the internal argument over what kind of divinity was standing on the tarmac, if anything the day sharpened it, since a hundred thousand people responding to the same event went on to describe what they had witnessed in an equally wide range of incompatible terms.