This annual AHR Conversation focuses on the issues and historiographic debates raised by the term “Black Internationalism.” Participants Monique Bedasse, Kim D. Butler, Carlos Fernandes, Dennis Laumann, Tejasvi Nagaraja, Benjamin Talton, and Kira Thurman bring a wide array of interests and areas of expertise to bear on the origins, evolution, and meaning of the concept of Black Internationalism; its application within Africa, the U.S., and the African diaspora more generally; and its relationship to gender, nationalism, and anticolonialism. In addition to tracing the deep roots of this framework for writing the history of Black resistance to slavery, colonialism, and white supremacy as global phenomena, they insist on seeing Black Internationalism from multiple points on the compass. Perspectives derived from the history—and intellectual production—of Africa, Europe, South America, and the Caribbean prove just as important, if not more so, than those emanating from the United States.

Through the life of Joshua Mkhululi, a Jamaican Rastafarian who repatriated to Tanzania in 1976, this article examines Rastafarian repatriation to Africa within the context of black internationalism. It argues that while the Rastafarian notion of return to Africa intersected with other diasporic ideas of return, the Pan-African thought that underlined diasporic back-to-Africa movements was contoured by the religious underpinnings of the Rastafarian movement.

This article is concerned with the evolution of the Rastafarian movement through the specific example of the Twelve Tribes of Israel. It provides a serious treatment of Rasta theology by delving into the details surrounding the ways in which Haile Selassie’s divinity is conceptualized. Placing the Rastafarian movement within the context of African resistance in the New World, it argues that as the movement evolves, it remains wedded to the ideals of Ethiopianism.

When Rastafarians began to petition the Tanzanian government for the “right of entry” in 1976, they benefitted from a history of linkages between Jamaica and Tanzania, facilitated largely by the personal and political friendship between Julius Nyerere and Prime Minister of Jamaica, Michael Manley. This is the subject of the third chapter, which provides essential context for the repatriation. The chapter begins by unearthing the pan-African politics of Michael Manley, which he constructed after appropriating Rastafarian symbols and consciousness into his political campaigns. It also puts a spotlight on the extent to which African leaders of newly independent states helped to define the pan-Africanism of this period by detailing the impact of Julius Nyerere on Manley’s thinking. Finally, it juxtaposes Manley’s acceptance in pan-African circles across Africa with his personal struggle over his own perceived distance from blackness, as a member of Jamaica’s “brown’ elite. In the end, Rastafari was absolutely central to generating the brand of politics surrounding race, color and class in the moment of decolonization. The history of repatriation transgresses analytical boundaries between state and nonstate actors.

This essay argues for an approach to postcolonial Caribbean intellectual history that moves beyond the national archive to rely on a globally dispersed archive. It uses Rastafari repatriation to Tanzania to highlight the intellectual history of the movement and to demonstrate the extent to which the repatriation created a transnational documentary trail with a set of archival imperatives that renders the national archive insufficient for the reconstruction of postcolonial Caribbean intellectual history.