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Despite the longer history of enthusiastic welcome to Rastafarians into the country, empirical work on the level of their integration with the local society has been largely scant. Regardless of enduring to settle for about four decades, the aftermath of Rastafarians´´ episode of flow to Shashemene had gained little attention. Notwithstanding empirical gaps and methodological flaws, available evidence suggests that immigration (Repatriation and spiritual pilgrimage as they prefer to call it) have considerably worthier to satisfy spiritual needs of Rastafarians than their living conditions and spurred economic activity. While it seems too early to generate firm conclusions, current knowledge suggests that immigrants had never yet secured their integration with local society since they choose to maintain their cultural and religious identities with the Rasta levity. However, the process of building interpersonal and intergroup relations remained unsatisfactory as a result of different barriers such as language incompetence, religious and cultural differences, isolated settlement patterns, discriminations and prejudices, lack of residence permits, and poor access to information.

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M.A. in Social Anthropology from Addis Ababa University. Lecturer & CRQA Head in DUC, and Lead-researcher in DYMDC.

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