On April 21, 1966, thousands of devoted Rastafari packed Jamaica’s Palisadoes Airport and lined the streets of Kingston, brimming with joyous anticipation at the arrival of Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia. Among them, 19-year-old Rita Marley looked on, curious about the proceedings, though admittedly skeptical.

“I had doubts myself when I heard about Rastafari (when) I met His Majesty [Haile Selassie I] in Jamaica,” Rita Marley told Zoomer magazine in a recent interview. “I read about him and [journalist-activist] Marcus Garvey, and I said to myself, ‘I can’t believe that (Selassie) is the returned Messiah. I would one day hope to see him.’”

As it happens, that visit proved much more important than Marley could have imagined.

“That dream brought myself to reality to say, ‘Yes, this is the man’ when I saw him,” Marley said of her encounter with Selassie. “And that was it. I started to preach the gospel.”

As her granddaughter, Donisha Prendergast, searches for her Rastafarian identity in the new documentary RasTa: A Soul’s Journey, Marley spoke with Zoomer magazine about her own Rasta experience, the struggles she and other Rastas endured, travelling with husband Bob Marley, and how far the movement has come since that day in April, 1966.