About the book: year / This book was supposed to be published at the Academy in 1992, and was written starting in 1989, but cataclysms happened: first in the country, and the publishing house fell apart, and then in my life - and for some time there was no time for that. Then there were repeated opportunities to publish it, but I didn’t want to - it already became clear that the text needed to be remade somehow: it was written for an academic publishing house, therefore the form, language, and standards of scholarly storytelling had to be observed then; important things that I saw or heard myself had to be omitted for the sake of little things, provided with links, since the intended reader knew nothing about growth and he needed to talk about something unknown and to convince that these are not my own fantasies (“...who needs African metalheads?” one of the now forgotten theorists of social orientation in Africa asked at the Academic Council). After the Curtain fell, it became possible to travel and communicate, buy books and periodicals on Rastafari and reggae, study in the British Library and go to Rastafari Cultural Centers in different countries, when Internet resources became available, and in Russia Rasta became a popular youth subculture , their own reggae clubs and reggae periodicals appeared, finally, after the average bearer of a humanities education stopped reading books on African studies and “got down to business”, and in their leisure time prefers light fiction, but a wide layer of educated and intelligent youth appeared, striving to expand your world to the universal, which grew up in the era of “world music” and “ethnic fashion” - after all this the text looks naive and pathetic. But to rewrite it “for our own people” and using all new materials (and they are an order of magnitude superior to what was so difficult to obtain in those years - although, surprisingly, almost everything was found in Moscow libraries - this is now a rare book gets there from abroad) - this requires a lot of time. Therefore, I leave everything as it is, hoping for leniency and promising to write a second part to follow up - this time as I can and would like to write today…