Bob Marley: Natty dread, pop idol, or national hero – Part 1

“We refuse to be

What you want us to be

We are what we are:

That’s the way it’s going to be”

– Bob Marley, Babylon System

I had the good fortune of knowing Bob Marley socially. If a natural catastrophe occurred, I believe Marley would be on the frontline, assisting victims and providing resources. If the occasion arose, he would have been among the first to step forward and be outfitted with the necessary equipment to defend Jamaica, in case our sovereignty was threatened.

Though misguided political rivals killed and injured each other with guns and other weapons in Marley’s time, armed insurrection against the State had never been a serious option. The last great conflict was Paul Bogle’s 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion. The 1938 workers’ riots were notable for the bravery of Jamaican peasants who stood against well-fortified capitalist institutions intent on maintaining an American-style sharecropping system. Ronald Henry’s failed revolution of 1960 has faded away into history, while the Tivoli Gardens insurrection of 2010 was the most recent attempted aggression on the State.

Marley was a born leader who led the Wailers. When the time came for them to go their separate ways, Marley ran the most successful music organisation of all reggae artistes, and, as it has turned out, no other entity superseded his Tuff Gong enterprise. Groups like the Wailers and individuals like Peter Tosh, Bunny Wailer, and Marley were not appreciated by the Jamaican elite or their elected representatives. This country’s class and race attitudes prevented the elites from recognising the artistic, sociological, cultural, and historic significance of the movement that Marley spearheaded.

Reggae and Rasta, however, have risen so far in international prestige that many among our elites have had no alternative but to accept the music and Rastafari as Jamaica’s primary cultural export and among its top economic assets. As the audience was reminded by former Prime Minister Bruce Golding at a King’s House ceremony on January 24, 2008 to launch the inaugural Reggae Month in February, “We were rejecting reggae as rude boy music while musicians were taking it abroad where its power would change the culture of the world.” In the same address, the prime minister stated: “None has captured, explored, and expanded the music’s potential more than Bob Marley. There’s no country in the world where you go where Bob Marley is not known and recognised. Bob Marley is Jamaican music. He personifies, [and] he symbolises Jamaican music.”

THE NEXT BIG THING

For the middle and upper class, Marley and his brethren were just little “dutty” Rastas inflaming society with back-to-Africa mumbo jumbo and black power nonsense that had no place here in the land of ‘Out of Many, One People’. Of course, no sooner had British and American metropolitan prognosticators tipped the Wailers as the next big thing in popular music than our ‘polite’ naysayers jumped the line to acclaim the group as Jamaica’s own answer to their beloved Tom Jones and the Beatles. Indeed, at a party I attended in 2008, I overheard a group of retired gentlemen, including politicians, judges, businessmen, and an army officer, dismissing the idea of Marley as a national hero as nonsense. I joined the group and listened to their reasons, hinged on Marley’s lifestyle, religion, and “being involved in music for the money”. Really? They floated the question: “What has he done for Jamaica?” Pause a moment and think that, even at that stage (2010) when Marley’s achievements were quantifiable and recognised internationally, these attitudes were still being expressed in Jamaica.

Additionally, and while it is not a prerequisite for accepting roots culture, further contemplate whether or not the majority of us who give standing ovations at National Dance Theatre Company performances of kumina, Pocomania, and Revival – all black vernacular religious rituals choreographed by the late intellectual guru and cultural expressionist Rex Nettleford – would stop by a roadside revival meeting, visit a Kumina yard, jump poco at a Revival tabernacle or Nyabinghi at a Grounation, as an embrace and acceptance of idiomatic cultural expression representative of the majority.

Part of that answer was provided at the party when the major related the following anecdote: “As a young conservative army officer, I viewed Bob Marley as a dreadlocked Rastafarian who smoked ganja. Then, I visited Uruguay, a right-wing dictatorship and a country where everyone is censored. My colleagues took me to a nightclub and, when Marley was played, from the crowd’s reaction to his music, I realised they couldn’t censor Marley, and I couldn’t help exclaiming, ‘this is one of ours’ .”

Now, the same proletariat (like their predecessors who supported the efforts of heroes past) that first recognised Marley’s prowess is still calling for him to be named a national hero. And the upper crust, the same naysayers of yesteryear, are up in arms against it. Their most vital point is that “Bob smoked ganja and fathered children by multiple women”, thereby precluding his status as a national hero.

The hypocrisy is even more disturbing because consumers and collectors are being asked to purchase commemorative Bank of Jamaica coins bearing the image of Marley for as much as US$100 per set. “As to the objections on the grounds of smoking ganja and fathering many children by different women,” asks music historian Dermot Hussey in an email to me in April 2008, “did the Queen (and Queen of Jamaica) not confer knighthood on Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones? I’m sure she was not honouring them based on their morality but on their creative achievements, and, as to the many children, is that not the norm in Jamaica? Whether it’s right is a moral judgement we are not equipped to make.”

Herbie Miller is a sociomusicologist specialising in the social and cultural history of plantation life and the black diaspora.

This article was first published in Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas (Vol.43, Issue 2, 2010). The essay has been updated based on the success of the biopic Bob Marley: One Love, and because of a poll finding done in January 2024 by Don Anderson’s Market Research Services Limited (MRSL). The results indicated that Jamaicans want Bob Marley to become Jamaica’s next national hero, “with 44 per cent of respondents giving him their stamp of approval”. [Radio Jamaica News. Friday, January 5, 2024].

Both updates reinforce the magnitude of Bob Marley’s importance and influence as a musician whose creativity resonates beyond entertainment. Marley’s story is a powerful indicator of the potential of the Jamaican people. If the system of governance placed serious importance on arts and culture, disciplines seemingly second nature to the Jamaican people, Marley could become the head ‘cornerstone’ in establishing such a system, one that utilises every symbol and signifier, including a deeper understanding of the role of national heroes to inspire social upliftment.