Rastas refer to themselves as “I and I,” speaking always in the plural because they believe that God lives inside them. To express this divine presence they change the numeral in the title of Selassie I of Ethiopia and pronounce it like the personal) pronoun. Most Rastas adhere to a strict vegetarian diet.
In the strictest Rastafari sect, called Niyabingi, Rasta take an oath pledging “death to black and white oppressors.” Yet they refuse to carry weapons: “Violence,” Bongo-U explains, “is left to Jah. God alone has the right to destroy.” Niyabingi Rastas cite Genesis, saying that God made the earth with words—“Let there be light, Jah said, and there was light.” They believe that when all Jah’s children are united in one cry—“death to black and white oppressors”—destruction will surely come to the exploiters. “Rastas believe in mind power and in the power of the elements, lightning, earthquake, and thunder,” Bongo-U says.
From the Book of Numbers Marley and other Rastas took the command never to cut their hair: “All the days of the vow of his separation there shall no razor come upon his head, he shall be holy, and shall let the locks of the hair of his head grow.” This is the oath of the Nazarites, which Jesus took. According to biblical injunction, Rastas cannot eat while others starve. They live communally, sharing goods and services among their community.
In the mid-’60s when there was an unprecedented rise in gang warfare and violent robberies in the West Kingston ghettos—police and politicians alike blamed the Rastas. The government ordered an offensive against Rasta communes and police viciously routed them and burned their homes. The worst attack involved the July 1966 destruction of Back-O-Wall, the worst part of the slums where numerous Rastas had settled in makeshift tin-and-board shacks. At dawn heavily armed police ringed the settlement with bulldozers while the occupants slept. Without warning they leveled the settlement, injuring and arresting scores of Rasta men, women, and children. This attack failed to destroy the Rastafari movement; instead it was scattered throughout Kingston and the rest of the island and soon began to challenge the norms, beliefs, and habits of Jamaicans throughout the island.
Once entrenched all over Kingston, the Rastafari, who had a history of self-reliance based on fishing, farming, and handicrafts, now inspired the youths to seek alternative employment outside the “shitstem!” Their call to “come out of Babylon” spurred an explosion of creative art and today Rasta painters and wood-carvers are transforming Kingston into a showplace of talent that generates considerable tourist business for Jamaica. But the most important product of the Rasta artistic renaissance is reggae music. Numerous drumming brotherhoods developed in the Kingston ghetto as unemployed youths and former rude boys turned to music as a profession and creative outlet.
Until 1966 Marley’s music consisted mostly of glorifications of the rude boy desperado life style. He had had hits with “Rude Boy,” “Rule Them Rudy,” “I’m the Toughest,” and the rude boy anthem “Stepping Razor.” But Marley came under the influence of Mortimo Planno, a high priest and a force among the West Kingston Rastafari, and his transformation began. Marley said Planno guided him to a consciousness which we always saw in him and which he only had to recognize. He emphasized that no one can make a person a Rasta: “You have to look inside yourself to see Rasta,” he said. “Every black is a Rasta, dem only have to look inside themselves. No one had to tell me, Jah told me himself. I and I looked inside I-self and I saw Jah Rastafari.”
After Planno, Vernon Carrington Gad, the Prophet to Rastas and the founder of the Twelve Tribes of Israel Rastafari sect to which Marley belonged, took the singer even further into Rastafari: “Gad revealed back to I and I the secret of the lost Twelve Tribes,” said Marley, who learned that each person is assigned to a tribe according to the month of their birth. “I was born in February so I’m from the tribe of Joseph,” he explained. “Somebody born in April 1 could say they are Aries and that’s what they will be because the word is power and you live it. But if you say you are Reuben, then you realize you find your roots because you become Jacob’s children, which is Israel. Jacob said thou art Reuben, thou art my firstborn, the beginning of my strength, the excellency of my dignity.”
In “Redemption Song” Marley identified himself as the present-day incarnation of Joseph, son of Jacob: “But my hand was strengthened by the hand of the almighty.” Genesis 49:24 says of Joseph: “But his bow abode in strength and his hand was made strong by the hand of the almighty.” Ramdeen, an East Indian dread, pointed to this bib-lical verse and said, “Same man that Bob Marley. Jah gave him the gift to write that music and put those words together. His mission was to deliver Israel through songs of redemption.”
In 1967 Marley quit recording, left Kingston and returned to the St. Ann’s mountain village where he was born. There in those hills he made a covenant with a new God, Jah Rastafari. This was to prove a pivotal event in his life, in his musical direction and in the history of the Rastafari movement itself. For a year Marley roamed the hills and practiced the ways of Rasta and soon Rastafari permeated his entire being. When Marley returned to Kingston in late 1968 he brought with him a new music and also a mission to take the word of Jah Rastafari to the people. His religion became the content of his music, and the music therefore became the medium through which he set out to take Rastafari to the world. Jamaica’s ex-prime minister Michael Manley said, “Marley took what was a subculture in Jamaica and elevated it to a dominant culture. He took a folk art,” he continued, “and he elevated it into a universal language of communication.” Marley’s first song of religious testimony, “Selassie I Is the Temple,” came in late 1968. This was followed by “Duppy Conqueror,” “Small Ax,” “Trenchtown Rock”—these songs zeroed in on poverty, injustice, and the evil of power politics. Marley had experienced a rebirth, and ready or not, Jamaica and the Rastafari had a new prophet. By constantly calling attention to the social inequities and by threatening and demanding redress, Marley and the Rastafari, mainly through music, moved not just the poor, but also middle-class intellectuals to question the ethics of Jamaican society and the conduct of government officials. Tremendous pressure was brought to bear on politicians as the music urged the people to view them with distrust. During the months preceding the 1972 elections, the ruling Jamaica Labor Party (led by Prime Minister Hugh Shearer) reacted by banning such songs from the radio. But a brisk black market developed in reggae and the music still played a big role in the defeat that year of the JLP by Michael Manley’s People’s National Party.
Without ever getting involved in power politics Bob Marley, who said, “me no sing politics, me sing ’bout freedom,” became a political force to be reckoned with. He was quoted and courted by both factions of Jamaica’s political establishment. Jamaican Albert Reid, a 63-year-old tractor operator, swore that if “Bob alone was in power in Jamaica we would have a lovely, peaceful country.”
In Jamaica and abroad, Bob Marley transcended barriers of race, color, and class. Marley said to me, “The different peoples of the earth are the different flowers of the earth. Jah made them all.” Indeed, people all over the world perceived that despite his pro-black stand he was not a racist, they knew he stood for love and respect for all peoples. Wailer vocalist Judy Mowatt says that, “even people of different languages and different cultures understood because his message was simple. He sang about the need for love and unity amongst all people.” The universality of the Rastafari message is perhaps the most important factor in the worldwide acceptance of Mar-ley’s music. Reggae music is also infusing new radical content into British and American popular music—the Wailers, Steel Pulse, Burning Spear, are topping the charts. At the Garden concert, Oja, a black American Rastaman, spoke of its connection to blacks here: “Reggae can make the music much more relevant to the real life experiences of black people in America. We listen to our radios more than we read or watch television and what does most of the music say to us? Party, party, dance, dance, get down, get down. But a reggae song might deal with th
e lack of food for the people, or about the war in Zimbabwe, or the need for blacks to unite. That’s why it’s so important for our people to hear reggae.”
In strife-torn Africa where various nations are in struggle for political power and self-determination, songs like Marley’s “War” inspired the revolutionaries to keep up the struggle: “. . . Until the ignoble and unhappy regime/That now hold our brothers/In Angola,/In Mozambique,/ South Africa,/In subhuman bondage,/Have been toppled/Utterly destroyed/Everywhere is war.” His “Zimbabwe” became a war cry for SWAPO and ZANU guerillas on the battlefield in what was then Rhodesia. This song internationalized the struggle and helped to win world support for Zimbabwe’s liberators. In 1978 the Senegalese Delegation to the United Nations presented Marley with the Third World Peace Medal, in tribute to his influence as a revolutionary artist.
Marley went even further in contributing to Zimbabwe—he headlined a concert at Boston’s Harvard Stadium and raised money for the new nation. For the first time in modern history a popular singer had thereby demonstrated that he could use his music and his popularity to influence the outcome of a war. This action won Marley worldwide acclaim, but also earned him enemies. As Marley developed he became increasingly secular and international in scope. Consider his 1979 release, “Babylon System,” which deals with workers passing their lives toiling in the capitalist profit machinery: “We’ve been treading on the/Wine press much too long,/Rebel, rebel/Babylon system is a vampire,/Sucking the children day by day,/Sucking the blood of the sufferers.” Marley called on the sufferers to take action to change their own lives. Such lyrics can be interpreted as anticapitalist and progressive, merely liberal, or anarchist—depending on the perspective of the listener: like the Rastafari ideology from which it comes, the reggae message is open-ended. And as Rastafari and reggae become more widespread, people of diverse political ideologies read their own meanings into the religion and the music.
Some Marxists read and interpret the songs as invocations to the international working class to unite and overthrow capitalism. “Marley’s reggae is the world’s most powerful battle cry,” said leftist economist Teresa Turner. “The task at hand is collecting the survivors of centuries of exploitation, racism, and degeneration—people who, as explained by Marx, are necessarily left out of the mainstream of society. Those survivors are potential revolutionaries and Marley’s reggae invokes them to keep up the fight as the life’s work of this generation. The mission of Rasta is to recreate society on a moral basis of equality.”
But theocratic Rastas like Marley are both anticapitalist and anticommunist, saying that both systems are evil and designed to oppress and destroy. They give allegiance to no authority but Jah Rastafari. Says Bongo-U: “We shall set politics against religion, religion against commerce, capitalism against communism, and set them to war! And they shall destroy themselves.” Since Rastas are in constant contact with God—reading a chapter of the Bible every day—there is no need for intermediaries. Thus there are no conventional leaders in the movement.
For the five years that preceded the diagnosis of cancer Rasta prophet Bob Marley had been working incessantly, ignoring the advice of doctors and close associates that he stop and obtain a thorough medical examination. No, he wouldn’t stop, he would have to quit the stage and it would take years to recoup the momentum. This was his time and he seized upon it. Whenever he went into his studio to record he did enough songs for two albums. Marley would drink his fish tea, eat his rice and peas stew, roll himself about six spliffs and go to work. With incredible energy and determination he kept strumming his guitar, maybe 12 hours, sometimes till daybreak; but he had to get just what he wanted, always the perfectionist.
When Marley and the Wailers arrived in New York in September 1980 for the concert at Madison Square Garden straight away I sought them out. Minion Phillips, a close friend of Marley who traveled with the Wailers, was even then extremely worried about Marley. She had had some terrifying dreams. In one she dreamt that Bob stood before her and she saw a big serpent curled up and moving round and round in his stomach, eating it out. “I’m afraid for Bob,” she said. “I have a feeling something terrible will happen. I don’t think this tour will be completed.”
“Marley! Marley! Marley! Marley!” resounded under the huge Madison Square Garden dome, then amid thunderous applause the audience of 20,000 jumped to its feet. There he stood. About five feet four inches, a slim man in denim jacket, jeans, and construction boots with his guitar held fast before him like a machine gun. He threw his ropelike head of hair about and it became a whirlwind around his small black face. The crack of a drum exploded into bass, into organ. And high above the roar of the audience, the sinewy tenor sliced through the inky space like the shrill call of a sea gull: “There’s a natural mystic flowing through the air/If you listen carefully now you will hear/This could be the first trumpet, might as well be the last/Many more will have to suffer/Many more will have to die.”
He became rock-still and intent at the microphone, a presence at once shocking and magical, totally in control. His eyes were dark holes in cheeks of slate. A huge crown of matted locks haloed his face and fell onto his back and shoulders. I jumped the barriers between seats and moved to different ends of the Garden, searching hard for signs of any weakness. Marley seemed in excellent form and the audience screamed for more each time he completed a song. “He’s okay,” I told myself, “he’s got to be okay to perform like this.”
The band was silent. Marley picked out a low note on his acoustic guitar. “Emancipate yourself from mental slavery/None but ourselves can free our minds/Have no fear of atomic energy/None of them can stop the time . . . These songs of freedom is all l ever had . . .” But why was he singing this one alone? And why the past tense—“all I ever had?” The next day, Sunday, Marley collapsed while jogging in Central Park. Tuesday the same thing happened in Pittsburgh during what became his last concert. The following Saturday I visited Rita Marley and Judy Mowatt. “How’s Bob?” I asked. Rita took my hand.
“We don’t know for sure,” she answered, “the doctors say he has a tumor in his brain.” I looked up at Minion Phillips and she was staring straight into my eyes. We both knew. The horror choked me.
The knowledge that Bob Marley might soon die haunted me for those months he spent fighting for his life in Dr. Joseph Issel’s cancer clinic in West Germany. Still I was shocked when I heard that he had died in Miami on Monday, May 11, en route to Jamaica. He knew the work was over. While in the hospital he told his mother, Cedella Booker, that he had had enough of the needles which for seven months pricked at his flesh. Less than 70 pounds, he was too weak to lift the guitar he hardly left alone for 20 years. Says Mrs. Booker, “He wasn’t afraid or bitter at the end. He said he was going into the hills to rest for a while.”
Bob slept and Rita Marley flew back to Jamaica. She journeyed to the mountains of Nine Miles Village, St. Ann’s. Marley had lived in a small house built by his father on the side of a steep hill overlooking the village in the valley below. There on that hill, Bob sat on a huge stone and wrote his classic, “Trenchtown Rock.” There she had spent some of the happiest days of her life. Bob’s tomb would stand beside the house right where the stone sat. She carefully chose the spot.
Rita decided then to build a temple with a roof and space enough for her to sit and talk with Bob. He would not be buried under the earth, but rest in a vault five feet above ground. She would embalm his body in the same way Egyptians and tribal Africans preserved their kings. Generations to come will be able to break the seals, draw Bob out and gaze upon him. She would take him to his resting place with the pomp and glory befitting a king.
When a king dies everyone has a theory; the reggae king is no exception. Some, like Fatso who sat behind me on the flight to Kingston, say that Marley committed suicide. Did Marley work himself to death at age 36, or did he work so furiously because he knew he would die young? Marley was always rubbing his forehead and grimacing while p
erforming. Did he know something no one else knew? “Who feels it knows it Lord,” he sang in his “Running Away” in 1978. “Bob spent too much time up in the ozone layer, that messed up his health,” said his photographer friend, Fikisha.
There is talk of foul play, despite what police say. One dread told me Bob was killed because he was an important revolutionary. He argued that “laser beams” were hooked up between the spotlights while Bob performed and they “burn out ’im brain.” Jamaican police sergeant Vernal Savane was certain marijuana killed Marley. “Ganja has destroyed a lot of youths,” he insisted. To Rastas that claim is ridiculous. Rasta George, a Niyabingi dread, said, “The holy herb can kill no one, it can only heal I and I.”
But the most controversial belief of the strict Niyabingi Rastafari is their total rejection of death. “Don’t expect a man like Bunny Wailer and Peter Tosh at Bob’s funeral,” said Niyabingi Rasta Ras Joe, “them men are livers—they do not deal with death.” Psalms 6:5 says, “For in the grave there is no remembrance of thee,” thus Niyabingi Rastas like Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer say let the dead bury the dead. They do not attend funerals. No hard feelings exist between the three founding members of the Wailers, indeed, if Peter died, Bob would not have shown up to his burial.
Every Little Thing Gonna Be Alright Page 15
