Bob Marley: The Untold Story. Chris Salewicz

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СКАЧАТЬ Norman Manley’s successor and cousin, Alexander Bustamante, sanctioned an attack by Jamaican security forces on Franklyn’s Rasta encampment in Coral Gardens, near Montego Bay; Franklyn and several associates were shot dead and across the island police beat Rastafarians and shaved off their hair.

      In the twenty-first century, dreadlocks are ubiquitous in many parts of the world – though often as a fashion statement rather than as an emblem of religious belief. This would seem to be missing the point for Jamaica’s followers of Rastafari; after all, they are fully aware that, at this time of great change, humanity is living in the last days. Following the prediction of the Book of Revelation, upright dreads believe that only the righteous will move forward through the apocalypse into the new era: only 144,000 souls, those who have battled to save the world from the perpetrators of the Babylonian greed and destruction that are all around and which are endeavouring to destroy both humanity’s essential good and the environment in which positivity may flourish.

      In the 1920s, the rhetorical fuel that would help bring about such fiery thinking was provided by Marcus Garvey, the colourful prophet of black self-determination. Garvey, who had been born in St Ann in 1887 and founded the United Negro Improvement Association, spoke to an audience at Madison Square Garden in New York of ‘Ethiopia, Land of our Fathers’, and proclaimed that ‘negroes’ believed in ‘the God of Ethiopia, the everlasting God’. Most significantly, he delivered a pivotal pronouncement: ‘Look to Africa, for the crowning of a Black King; He shall be the Redeemer.’ (Later, there was some debate about this: was it Garvey who said these words? For an associate of his, the Reverend James Morris Webb, the author of A Black Man Will be the Coming Universal King, Proven by Biblical History, had spoken to the same effect at a meeting in 1924.)

      In 1930, rising above aristocratic in-fighting which could have overshadowed that in a Medici court, Ras Tafari Makonnen, great-grandson of King Saheka Selassie of Shoa, was crowned Emperor of Ethiopia and given the name of Haile Selassie, King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah. Surely this was the fulfilment of Garvey’s prophecy?

      As they were elsewhere in the world, the 1930s were years of social unrest and upheaval in Jamaica. Labour unrest on the island in 1938 culminated in the vicious suppression of striking sugarcane workers on the Tate & Lyle estate at Frome in Westmoreland in the west of Jamaica. Under the orders of Tate & Lyle, the estate’s manager, a member of the Lindo family, met with six hundred plantation workers and dismissed out of hand their demands for wages of a minimum of four shillings a day, offering half that amount.

      After hearing the addresses of assorted labour leaders, including Alexander Bustamante, then the leader of the new Jamaican labour movement, the workers attacked the Tate & Lyle offices and assaulted the European staff. Local police fixed bayonets and advanced on the employees: four strikers were killed, including an elderly woman who was bayoneted to death. Dozens were rounded up and jailed, including Bustamante.

      Such labour and social unrest was a perfect context for the rise of a band of islanders who had divorced themselves mentally from a system in which such wrongs could be perpetrated. Though often cast as a religion of the dispossessed, there is an element of condescension in such an assessment of Jamaica’s early followers of Rastafarianism. Denied is the intellectual, even existential, acuity and rigour of so many practitioners of the religion: the depth of biblical and historical knowledge displayed at a Rastafarian reasoning is impressive, as is the mental agility to perceive every semantic subtlety of the arguments propagated. The myriad contradictions that litter Rastafari assume the status of numinous truths when one recalls Carl Jung’s assertion that ‘all great truths must end in paradox.’

      In the hills of eastern Jamaica, in the parish of St Thomas, which is traditionally associated with such mystical – and specifically Jamaican – strands of Christianity as kumina, pocomania, and revivalism, Rastafarian encampments sprang up; here a life of ascetism and artistry became the armour of the religion’s followers against Babylon. To the west, Leonard Howell, one of the island’s chief propagators of the religion, also known as ‘the Gong’, founded the Pinnacle encampment in an abandoned hilltop estate between Kingston and Spanish Town, conveniently, when it came to growing plantations of marijuana, out of sight of the authorities. Eventually taking thirteen wives, Howell finally decided that it was not Haile Selassie who was Jah but himself. After his mountain eyrie was raided by police in 1954, he was thrown into a home for the mentally ill, and Pinnacle was closed down. The dreads from it spilled into the ghettoes of west Kingston. Shortly before and after independence in 1962, the violent incidents between Rastas and the police made headlines in the Daily Gleaner, but the number of His Majesty’s followers involved in such affairs was infinitesimal compared to the way the movement was burning its thoughts with the speed of a bush-fire into the popular psyche of Jamaica.

      But it took the unceasing efforts of one man, who had come up in Kingston hearing the stream-of-consciousness orations of dreads in Back-a-Wall and the Dungle, to popularise and make universally known the apparently crazy idea that the emperor of Ethiopia could be the living deity.

      That man, of course, was Bob Marley, who came to be seen as the personification of Rastafari. Without Bob Marley most of the world would never have learned of Jah Rastafari, or entered into any debate whatsoever about the possible divinity of Haile Selassie. In Jamaica, the image of His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I, King of Kings, Conquering Lion of Judah is inescapable, accompanied as it invariably is by a soundtrack of the addictive hymns of praise to His divinity that make up most of the material of roots and conscious reggae – a music whose father, to all intents and purposes, was the fatherless Bob Marley, a man who never wrote an indifferent song and who united masses around the globe. Many of his brethren in the faith felt that this was the entire purpose of the blessing of the man’s talent. Many others, however, believed that Bob was capable of this task because of his spiritual closeness to His Majesty himself, on whose right-hand side he was more than adequately fitted to sit.

      As yet, young Nesta Marley knew almost nothing about the Rastas’ religion. He was simply getting through his schooldays, in a more perfunctory manner than perhaps his hardworking mother realised, anxious to get out into some form of adult life. However, his mother had moved him yet again: to St Aloysius Boys School, located at 74–6 Duke Street, on the corner of Sutton Street and Duke Street, run by Catholic sisters. Bob never really adapted to St Aloysius: ultimately, he would come to understand he had had almost no secondary education. With no permanent male role model to act as a guide, the transition from childhood to adolescence was even more awkward for him than for most teenagers. And in the evenings, his mother would not be around. On the corner of Beeston Street and Spanish Town Road, Cedella had started up a ‘cold-supper shop’, as they are known in Jamaica – curiously, as the food cold-supper shops offer is generally hot, fried, or cooked in a pot, sold next to the bottles of Red Stripe and rum that also characterise such institutions. Late one afternoon, whilst Cedella was working at her business, a rough-looking youth appeared in her shop. ‘Lady, you have a son named Nesta?’ he demanded. When Cedella asked why he wanted to know, the youth replied that Nesta had got a ‘chop over his eye’. Worried, she went to search for her son, but he ran off when she caught a glimpse of him down by his school. When he eventually came up to see his mother at her shop, Nesta had a Band-Aid plastered above his eye. One of his friends, he said, had thrown a stone and caught his face, an everyday cause of blindness in developing countries. Nesta had run off when he’d seen his mother by the school, he said, in case she might have called the police on his friend.

      There would be few more opportunities for such after-school pranks. When he was 15, Nesta came home one day from school carrying a large pile of textbooks. Cedella asked him why. The headteacher, he told his mother, had closed down the school and returned to live in the country. Although startled by the news, Cedella knew there was only one response: to get her son working, preferably at a trade. She was used to the sound of Nesta rehearsing music with his friends – specifically, Bunny Livingston and a friend from the neighbourhood, Desmond (Dekker) Dacre – but she had little faith that this would secure his future. By now, СКАЧАТЬ