When one listens to everything from mento to reggae, one sees in instant reflection the dilemma of identity. The strong African root is there, particularly in the rhythm and the use of drums. But so great was the act of cultural destruction that all of the infinite subtlety and sophistication, which sets African drumming apart, is missing. I can remember the first time I heard an authentic African drummer, I was astonished and for a while had difficulty in understanding what was going on, so intricate were the variations, so complex the rhythmic embroidery around the central driving beat. In Jamaica, only the central beat has survived. EVEN THIS SURVIVAL IS A MIRACLE IN THE CIRCUMSTANCES.
The most fundamental question that arises about reggae is: how did it become so explicitly and positively political? The greatest of the calypsonians, the MIGHTY SPARROW has journeyed into political commentary; but even he, quintessentially a part of the Trinidadian environment, although born in Grenada, has stopped short of the assertion of rights, has not essayed a positively revolutionary call. BY CONTRAST, THE GREATER PART OF BOB MARLEY IS THE LANGUAGE OF REVOLUTION.
CLAIMING A FUTURE
Middle class intellectuals had claimed a future for the Caribbean. But this was not reflected in the spontaneous music of the ghetto.
WHAT GAVE MARLEY THE COURAGE TO GO BEYOND MOCKERY TO HOPE: TO TRANSCEND COMMENT AND ASSERT RIGHT? TO FIND THE ANSWER TO THIS YOU MUST ENQUIRE: DID BOB MARLEY REDEEM HIS IDENTITY BY RE-CROSSING THE MIDDLE PASSAGE AND REENTERING THE KINGDOM OF HIS PAST? HE WHO KNOWS HIS PAST CAN BELIEVE THAT THE FUTURE IS THE TERRITORY OF HOPE. HE WHO KNOWS NOT HIS PAST FINDS THAT IN SPITE OF HIMSELF, HIS FUTURE IS, IN HIS MIND, A BURIAL GROUND. FAITH BEGINS WITH AN ACCEPTANCE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF CONTINUITY. IF YOU CANNOT SURVEY A CONTINUITY INTO YOUR OWN PAST, YOU CANNOT BELIEVE IN A CONTINUITY INTO YOUR OWN FUTURE. MARLEY HAD THAT FAITH.
RASTA—THE FAITH
How did Bob Marley successfully undertake this journey into his past, which released him to a belief in his people’s future? The answer is: Rastafarianism. I enter into no controversy about people and their faith. To each his own. But it is inextricably a part of the psychodrama in which the black of the diaspora are enmeshed that their traditional, Christian faith is visualized in white terms. Inevitably and obviously, a religion that was spawned at the very centre of white civilization expresses its faith through familiar symbols. lf the servants and children of God are white, they will think of both God and Christ in terms of self-image. Therefore, the God that emerges will be imagined to be white. Every church has its sculpture and its painting expressed in white terms. So the children of the slaves begin with a visual contradiction. To compound the problem, the particular expression of Christianity was first the creature of the oppressor. Yet, the children of the slaves need faith and have faith. They are sure there is a God and they are sure that somewhere that God is their God rooted in the land of the past and visualized in terms of their self-image.
Rastafarianism is a true faith in the sense that its believers have taken that step beyond mere rationality into the acceptance of a view of the unknown, unknowable and improvable which is faith. To them Haile Selassie is the symbol of God on earth and God himself is as revealed in the Holy Scriptures. The true Rastafarian, therefore, has traced his identity beyond mere history and geography to the ultimate source of all things, for the believer, the Creator himself. BUT HE HAS ARRIVED AT HIS CREATOR THROUGH THE IMAGES AND THE SOIL OF AFRICA. BY THAT ACT HE HAS RE-DISCOVERED THE SELF THAT WAS MISLAID IN THE MIDDLE PASSAGE.
ROBERT NESTA MARLEY, O.M.
ROBERT NESTA MARLEY, Order of Merit (O.M.), super star, father and definitive exponent of reggae, was a Rastafarian. He had taken that journey. By that act he had solved his identity crisis. He had become a complete human being. In his completeness he could sing songs of compassion: “No Woman, No Cry”; he could spit revolutionary defiance: “War”; he could embrace proletarian internationalism: “Zimbabwe”—AND HE COULD DO IT ALL WITH AN UNSELFCONSCIOUS CONVICTION THAT MADE HIM A KIND OF SPONTANEOUS, UNCOMPROMISING REVOLUTIONARY, UNTOUCHED BY WEALTH, UNFAILINGLY GENEROUS, ETERNALLY UNSPOILT.
I AND I
I first knew Bob Marley in 1971, in the days of “Trench Town Rock”. At this stage his music was still like visceral protest carried on the wings of a relatively uncomplicated commentary on the ghetto. Throughout that year, he used to perform as part of a group of artists who traveled all over Jamaica with me as the Party which I led prepared for the General Elections of 1972. Until that time, my own political perceptions had reflected a mutually reinforcing marriage. On the one hand, there was the political theory, which I had absorbed from my Father as a youth and had developed into explicit Socialist doctrine as a student in University. On the other hand was some twenty years as an organizer and negotiator with the Jamaican Trade Union Movement. To this was now added a vital and new ingredient. I could never pretend that the lyrics of the protest music, which were the driving motivations of reggae, taught me things that I did not know. From an intellectual point of view, they were confirmatory of all that I believed as a Socialist, and have struggled against as a Trade Unionist. But I had not myself been born in the ghetto and was not personally a part of that experience. Reggae music influenced me profoundly by deepening the element of emotional comprehension.
STRUGGLE FOR CHANGE
I suppose a rough equivalent might be sought by a consideration of the influence of a writer like Dickens upon the sensibilities of English readers in the Nineteenth Century. In highly literate societies, the pen is a mighty instrument. It cannot change the structure of classes, nor the relations between classes, because it cannot, of itself, change the nature and organization of production. But it can pry loose from traditional class attitudes those extraordinary individuals who become a part of the process of political change in a society.
Jamaica had produced a handful of great writers like GEORGE CAMPBELL, ROGER MAIS and VIC REID who had spoken to the issues of suffering and oppression. Their works helped create an awareness of the imperatives of change. But how many people read them? Everybody listened to Marley and his school of reggae protestors. Certainly, I listened and was reinforced in the conviction that we had to STRUGGLE FOR CHANGE.
REGGAE GONE INTERNATIONAL
The invention of the gramophone, the radio and television has created a mass market for contemporary music. Where the symphony orchestra became the principal instrument for the dissemination of the great music of the classical European tradition, simpler forms of music would now have international currency. Technology brought into the market the broad masses of the people virtually everywhere on the globe. So there is no mystery about the means by which Bob Marley’s music, and reggae along with it, have become familiar to the peoples of Europe, Africa and the Americas.
The real issue to be examined however is why has reggae established an audience for itself among the myriad of competing musical forms, which jostle for space in the communication apparatus? Pride of place is held by synthetic, escape music. With its bromides and anodynes it is there to pour balm on the souls that are either damaged by the failure to beat the economic system or bored because they have.
At the other end of the spectrum is the biting but parochial satire of the calypso, which makes no impression on the international system whatsoever. Blues hold a significant place because sadness is a recognizable part of the human condition. In any case, America has produced most of the greatest technical virtuosos who have come out of the non-classical tradition. Clearly, reggae cannot, and is not going to compete with the escape music; but unlike the calypso, it has already carved a significant niche for itself. I can only hazard a guess that this owes much to two factors. Firstly, there is Marley himself: an authentic innovator, a genuine original in the sense that is true, say, of a STEVIE WONDER. Reggae has “gone international”, therefore partly on the back of Marley’s gifts. But it must also be true that the protest of reggae, the positive assertion of moral categories goes beyond parochial boundaries. A
MONG OTHER THINGS REGGAE IS THE SPONTANEOUS SOUND OF A LOCAL REVOLUTIONARY IMPULSE. BUT REVOLUTION ITSELF IS A UNIVERSAL CATEGORY. IT IS THIS, POSSIBLY, WHICH SETS IT APART EVEN TO THE INTERNATIONAL EAR.
Bob Marley in Zimbabwe: The Untold Story
Adapted by Ree Ngwenya from Bob Marley: Songs of Freedom by Adrian Boot and Chris Salewicz
(Source: Zimbabwe Standard/African News Service, June 12, 2001)
IT was April 1980, the end of a hard week, around 4 pm, on a Friday afternoon. Mick Carter was in his office, thinking about maybe leaving early for the weekend. Then the phone rang.
Bob Marley was calling from the Tuff Gong International offices in Kingston. Could Mick organize a crew and all the necessary equipment and fly to Salisbury in Rhodesia over the weekend? On Tuesday, 18 April, the country was changing its name to Zimbabwe, and the city would be renamed Harare.
Bob had two officials from Zimbabwe’s government in his office with him, and they had asked him to perform at the independence ceremonies. Cost was to be no barrier: Bob, whose tune “Zimbabwe” had proved inspirational to the ZANLA freedom fighters, was paying for it all out of his pocket. He would be playing amidst the ruins of Great Zimbabwe.
At the Islands Record offices in West London, Denise Mills received a similar call: “Bob said he was flying into London over the weekend and wanted to continue straight on to Africa. Could we arrange it?”
Within two hours, Carter had booked his crew and PA equipment. More importantly, he had also chartered a 707 waiting on the tarmac at Gatwick airport.
The next day the plane took off at Gatwick, carrying the agent, the lighting, the soundmen and the sound equipment.
The advance party for this Bob Marley expedition to Africa caused much bewilderment when it arrived at Salisbury airport, as it was then still known.
“The import people hadn’t a clue what to do, how to deal with us,” Carter said.
“What got us and everyone through was a huge bag of Bob Marley T-shirts that I had sensibly persuaded Island to give me before I left. These were liberally dispensed all around. And it also helped enormously that I was wearing an Exodus tour jacket, which was my passport to everything.”
The only contact Carter had been given was an address in Harare—Job’s Nite Spot, a club run by one Job Kadengu, a secondhand car dealer who worked for Zanu PF, who had somehow become the promoter.
Kadengu passed Carter to a certain Edgar Tekere, the minister for planning and development. At 3:30 am, on Sunday morning, Carter was driven in a taxi to Tekere’s bungalow to wake him up and receive instructions.
A bleary-eyed Tekere directed Carter to the Rufaro Stadium on the edge of Harare where the independence ceremony was to be held. When he and his crew arrived there, a team of night watchmen loomed out of the darkness, trying to chase them off.
Within hours, Carter had secured the services of a squad of soldiers and a scaffolding company to build the stage.
“But the wood we were given was green and came from a damp warehouse. As the sun came and dried it, the planks turned rotten. We laid down tarpaulin, but we kept having to make chalk-marks where the holes were. I saw two wooden gates, and had them taken down and they became the PA stage.”
But there was still no electrical power and there seemed little hope of the promised generator arriving to provide it.
“However,” Carter remembers, “we found a cable running underneath the pitch. It provided electricity to a nearby village (township). So this guy jumped in and cut it for us to tap into it and as he did so, you could see the lights go out in the village.”
There were no hotels booked for the Marley party. Everywhere was full, booked up weeks before, to accommodate visiting dignitaries who were coming from all over the world for the independence ceremony. Although he temporarily managed to secure a hotel room, Carter was kicked out of it at gunpoint by several soldiers.
Bob and the Wailers were taken to a guest-house 20 miles out of town; even so, there were not enough rooms for the group and Bob shared his room with Neville Garrick, Family Man, Gillie and Dennis Thomson, the engineer.
Bob took a commercial flight to Nairobi. As he waited in the transit lounge for his plane, he received an unexpected message from a royal equerry: Prince Charles was waiting in the VIP suite; would Bob care to come and join him and pay his respects?
If Prince Charles wanted to meet him, he should come out there and check him with all the people. Needless to say, Bob’s invitation was not accepted.
Some time later, as Bob and the Wailers sat by the window of the departure lounge, they saw the royal party crossing the tarmac in the direction of the royal jet. When Prince Charles had walked only a few yards, however, he turned and looked up at the window where Bob was sitting. Looking directly into Bob Marley’s eyes, Prince Charles smiled broadly. Then he continued on his way.
Bob and his party flew into Harare in the early evening of Sunday, 16 April.
With him were Denise Mills, Robert Partridge, and Phil Cooper, respectively the heads of press and international affairs at Island Records in London.
“The most amazing thing,” Denise remembers, “was the arrival at the airport.
“Joshua Nkomo, who was minister of home affairs in Robert Mu-gabe’s new government, and various cabinet officials had to line up and shake our hands. I couldn’t believe it: there were about 26 of us and I’m sure none of the people had a clue who we were.
“When we went to tea at the palace with these drunken soldiers and the president, it was so English and colonial: cucumber sandwiches and lemonade—all considered a bit off by the Wailers.
“However, Bob sang ‘No Woman No Cry’ at the piano for the president’s family.”
What no one had thought to inform Bob and his team was the precise nature of the first show they would be playing: it was scheduled for the slot immediately following the ceremony in which Zimbabwe would receive its independence and was to be performed in front of only the assembled dignitaries and the media as well as the party faithful, the international luminaries included Britain’s Prince Charles and India’s Indira Gandhi.
Such a scheduling implied that the events would have an exact order. But instead, Carter said: “It was complete anarchy. Bob went on immediately after the flag-raising ceremony. We had arrived at 8:30 in the evening, and were leisurely getting ready. We hadn’t realized just how suddenly they expected us on stage. When they announced us, we weren’t ready at all.”
In fact, the first official words uttered in Zimbabwe, following the raising of the new flag, were: “Ladies and gentlemen, Bob Marley and the Wailers.”
Twenty minutes later, Bob and The Wailers started their set. As soon as the first notes rang out, pandemonium broke loose in the enormous crowd gathered by the entrance to the sports stadium: the gates shook and began to break apart as the crush increased, the citi- zens of Harare, both excited and angry at being excluded from seeing these inspirational musicians.
As clouds of teargas drifted almost immediately into the stadium itself, the audience on the pitch fell on their feet in an attempt to protect themselves. The group members tasted their first whiffs of the gas and left the stage. “All of a sudden,” said Judy Mowatt, “you smell this thing taking over your whole body, going in your throat until you want to choke, burning your eyes. I looked at Rita (Marley) and Marcia and they were feeling the same thing.”
“I feel my eyes and nose,” remembered Family Man, “and think, from when I was born, I have to come all the way to Africa to experience teargas.”
Bob, however, seemed to have moved to a transcendent state. His eyes were shut, and for a while the gas didn’t seem to have an effect at all. Then he opened his eyes and left the stage.
Backstage, the group had taken refuge in a truck. Outside they could see small children fainting and women collapsing. It looked like death personified to Mowatt, who briefly wondered whether they had been brought to Zimbabwe to meet their ends.
She persu
aded someone to drive her and the other I-Threes back to the hotel, only to discover on the television that the show had resumed. After about half an hour Bob and the Wailers had gone back on stage. They ended their set with “Zimbabwe,” a song Bob had worked on during his pilgrimage to Ethiopia late in 1978, and which became arguably his most important single composition.
Bob was just coming offstage as Mowatt and her fellow women singers returned to the stadium. “Hah,” he looked at them with a half-grin, “now I know who the real revolutionaries are.”
It was decided that the group would play another concert the following day, to give the ordinary people of Zimbabwe an opportunity to see Bob Marley.
Over 100,000 people—an audience that was almost entirely black—watched this show by Bob Marley and the Wailers. The group performed for an hour and a half, the musicians fired up to a point of ecstasy. But Bob, who uncharacteristically hadn’t bothered to turn up for the sound check, was strangely lackluster in his performance; a mood of disillusionment had set in around him following the tear-gassing the previous day.
After the day’s performance, the Bob Marley team was invited to spend the evening at the home of Tekere. This was not the most relaxed of social occasions.
As the henchmen strutted around with their Kalashnikovs, Mills was informed by Tekere that he wanted Bob to stay in Zimbabwe and tour the country. “Bob told me to say he wasn’t going to, but the guy didn’t want to hear me.”
Every Little Thing Gonna Be Alright Page 22