Alexander Bedward

Jamaican labourers were subjected to harsh working conditions, before being boarded up at night in shoddy, disease-ridden shacks.

White and mixed-race Jamaicans worried about the African influences on these Native Baptist interpretations of Christianity.

[6] In the 1880s, he started to gather large groups of followers by conducting services which included reports of mass healings.

He identified himself with Paul Bogle, the Baptist leader of the Morant Bay rebellion, and he stressed the need for changes to the inequalities in race relations in Jamaican society.

He warned that the government of the Colony of Jamaica was passing laws to oppress black people, and was robbing them of their money and their bread.

[9] By 1894, the Native Baptist Free Church was so thriving that it was able to commission a temple on the banks of the river, a confirmation in stone and slate that the Great Revival had produced genuine competition to the traditional centres of community power.

The crowds at Hope River grew larger, and increasing numbers committed to his regime of fasting and temperance.

On New Year's Eve, in 1920, now an older man, Bedward told his followers that the LORD had called him to fly up to Heaven.

[16] His contemporary, Robert Love, the inspirational advocate of racial uplift via education and political engagement, always thought Bedward to be nothing more than a skilled showman whom a hysterical establishment had managed to turn into a martyr.

[17] Bedwardism planted a seed from which a culture of racial consciousness grew, and found its most emphatic form in Marcus Garvey and his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA).

He led his followers into Garveyism by finding the charismatic metaphor: one the high priest, the other prophet, both leading the children of Israel out of exile.

Rastafari has taken the idea of Garvey as a prophet, while also casting him in the role of John the Baptist, by virtue of his "voice in the wilderness" call taken as heralding their expected Messiah, "Look to Africa where a black king shall be crowned."