The Boys from Brooklyn

Jamaica's whites and government officials were at first only amused last October when a self-anointed Negro holy man, the Rev. Claudius Henry, R.B. (for "Repairer of the Breach") stirred an estimated 20,000 bearded cultists into a back-to-Africa frenzy. No one paid much attention, even when Henry's ''Ras Tafarians"* pranced about holding aloft an empty platter they swore would hold Premier Norman Manley's head if he blocked their way. In April, when raiding police found a cache of firearms and cement-packed conch shells (obviously intended as missiles) in a Ras Tafarian church, Jamaican authorities decided that the Rev. Claudius Henry was no joke. He was jailed on a charge of treason. Even with their leader in jail, violence broke out into the open last week.

Focus of the fighting was no longer Africa. Instead the new goal is to convert Jamaica itself into a Ras Tafarian-run island republic. The leaders include Henry's son Reynold and ten U.S. Negroes from Brooklyn, some of them ex-G.I.s. Police deported some of the boys from Brooklyn when they turned up for Henry's back-to-Africa rallies last October. They got in again three weeks ago under assumed names, went underground in the remote Red Hills region seven miles northwest of Kingston, and began breaking out smuggled weapons.

Last week 250 Jamaican policemen and rookies of Britain's Royal Hampshire Regiment were sent out to reconnoiter the Red Hills. The soldiers carried rifles, but no bullets (Jamaican law forbids foreign troops to carry live ammunition without special permission). An unarmed patrol of British soldiers ran straight into an ambush laid by Reynold and his Brooklyn buddies, surrendered after the first burst of machine-gun fire. The Ras Tafarians then ordered the tommies to kneel, shot at them from short range. Two were killed, the other two wounded. The guerrillas commandeered a truck and headed deeper into the hills.

When news of the killing reached Kingston, Premier Manley mobilized the island's forces. A force of 1,000 men--Jamaican cops, West India Regiment troops and British soldiers of the Hampshires--was sent into action with aircraft, police dogs mortar and rocket crews. Manley pleaded with Jamaican hill-dwellers who knew the fugitives' whereabouts to cooperate in tracking them down, but for fear of Ras Tafarian reprisal, the answer was silence.

* Who take their name from one of Haile Selassie's family names, trace back to the U.S. back-to-Africa movement led by Jamaica-born Marcus Garvey in the 1920s.

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