The Holy Piby was written by Robert Athlyi Rogers, who founded an Afrocentric religion in the US and West Indies in the 1920s. Rogers' religious movement, the Afro Athlican Constructive Church, saw Ethiopians (in the Biblical sense of Black Africans) as the chosen people of God, and proclaimed Marcus Garvey, the prominent Black Nationalist, an apostle. The church preached self-reliance and self-determination for Africans. The original is very rare. There are no copies listed in either the Library of Congress or the University of California catalogs, which is highly unusual. The Holy Piby was banned in Jamaica and other Caribbean Islands in the middle and late 1920s. Today the Holy Piby is acclaimed by many Rastafarians as a primary source.