You do not have to look far in Africa to see the influence of reggae music. Once I met a Tuareg tribesman in the Sahara Desert who proudly played me a Bob Marley ringtone on his cell phone. Reggae music swept ’round the world in the 1970s, then receded a bit in most places. It still lives large in Africa. There is great reverence for the Jamaican classics, but there are also many lively local scenes. Reggae is music for the dispossessed, and Africa itself plays a leading role in reggae’s narrative. In reggae mythology, Africa is the Promised Land, the destined homeland where the African diaspora will someday be repatriated. Africa—and Ethiopia in particular—is the “Land of Zion” sung about in so many reggae songs.

Reggae has its own code and language, infused largely with the ideology of the Rastafarians—followers of a spiritual system that arose in the 1930s in Jamaica. A big influence on the Rastafarians was Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican political leader in the 1920s who led a Back to Africa movement among descendants of slaves throughout the Americas. Rastafarians regard Garvey as a prophet who predicted that one day a black man would be crowned king in Africa and would bring deliverance to dark-skinned people everywhere.

“Follow, follow, follow, follow Marcus Garvey’s footsteps,” sang reggae singer Burning Spear. And where exactly was Garvey going? “We’re leaving Babylon, we’re going to our father’s land,” Bob Marley told us in “Exodus.” Not Babylon, Long Island, mind you, but the metaphorical one where, as Marley sang, “the system is the vampire”—the wicked place that embodies all of what’s wrong with Western culture. Babylon, as Steel Pulse said, “makes the rules . . . where my people suffer.”

Shashemane was made possible by a 1948 land grant that accommodated, for free, any Caribbean of African descent who wanted to “come home.”

When Haile Selassie I was declared emperor of Ethiopia, in 1930, the followers of Garvey believed Garvey’s prophecy had been fulfilled. They declared His Imperial Majesty to be the Messiah, or “Jah.” Selassie’s pre-coronation name, Ras Tafari Makonnen, was adopted to name their movement.

Last November, I had some business in Ethiopia, but I went a couple of days early. We know much about the influence of Ethiopia on the Rastafarians. I was curious to see the impact of the Rastafarian movement on Ethiopia. Rastafarians encourage their followers to pick up and head to Ethiopia, to repatriate. Underneath reggae’s cool backbeat rhythms are endless messages to get thee back to Zion. Billions of dollars worth of that message have been repeated over and over, all around the planet, for the past 40 years. With more than a million Rastafarians in the world now, shouldn’t Ethiopia be teeming with Rastas?