Mutabaruka (formerly Allan Hope) was born in Rae Town, Kingston on 26th December, 1952. After primary education he attended Kingston Technical High School, where he was a student for four years. Trained in Electronics, he left his first job after about six months and took employment at the Jamaica Telephone Company Limited. During his time at the Telephone Company he began to examine Rastafarianism and to find it more meaningful than either the Roman Catholicism of his upbringing or the political radicalism into which he had drifted.
In the late 1960's and early 1970's there was an upsurge of Black Awareness in Jamaica, in the wake of a similar phenomenon in the United States. Muta, then in his late teens, was drawn into that movement. Illicitly, in school he read many "progressive books" including Eldrige Cleaver's Soul on Ice and some that were then illegal in Jamaica, such as The Autobiography of Malcom X. Muta saw himself as a young revolutionary. But when he deepened his investigation of Rastafarianism, which he had once regarded as essentially passive, he came to find its thinking more radical than that of the non-Rastafarian group with which he had associated. While still employed at the Telephone Company, he stopped combing his hair, started growing locks, altered his diet, and declared himself Rastafarian. A number of his friends thought he was going mad.