‘Many Rastas were chased away, but we’re determined to remain’: Ethiopia’s religious community under threat

Ras Paul with his vinyl collection at his home in Shashamene, Ethiopia. Photograph: Fred Harter/The Observer

In 1999, Ras Paul, a west London DJ born to Jamaican parents, sold part of his voluminous vinyl collection to buy a plot of land and build a house in Shashamene, 125 miles south of Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa.

Seven years earlier, he had become a Rastafarian, around the time of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie, whom the religion reveres as the Messiah. “As an Ethiopian descendent, I wanted to come home,” he says. “It’s the place I felt I belong.”