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Just one glance was enough. In 1974, Prince Philip was returning from a holiday in the south Pacific when he became a god. Midway through the journey, the royal yacht Britannia was anchored off the island of Aneityum. Villagers from Tanna, a neighbouring island, paddled out in their canoes to catch a glimpse of him. “I saw him standing on the deck in his white uniform,” Jack Naiva, the chief of the Yaohnanen people until 2009, said in a later interview. “I knew then that he was the true messiah.”
Haile Selassie I, the Ethiopian king, didn’t even need to be seen to be perceived as divine. In 1931, National Geographic ran a 68-page report on his coronation in Addis Ababa. Preachers and pamphleteers read the article in faraway colonial Jamaica and proclaimed him their ordained saviour, a manifestation of the “black divine”. A baroque magazine piece – written by, of all people, the then US consul-general to Ethiopia – became a gospel for generations of believers who called themselves “Rastafarians” after Selassie’s birth name: Tafari Makonnen (“Ras”, a title, was bestowed later). By the 1950s, the anthropologist George Eaton Simpson reported that men were proselytising on the streets of Kingston with the Bible in one hand and a “weathered copy” of the magazine in another. Never mind that Selassie didn’t consider himself “black”, or the fact that National Geographic routinely ran pieces that referred to indigenous people as “savages”, and African Americans were forbidden from becoming members or using its library in Washington DC. As Anna Della Subin notes in Accidental Gods, the...