Happy Birthday, Bob Marley
Bob explained his conception like this: "My father was a guy yunno, form England here, yunno? Him was like....like you can read it yunno, it's one o' dem slave stories: white guy get the black woman and reed her. He's a English guy...I t'ink. Cos me see him one time yunno. My mother? My mother African" (Davis, 21). In another, earlier interview, he called his conception "pure Babylon" (Davis, 21).
Babylon is a reference to corruption and sin but more specifically is a reference to slavery. In the Bible, the Israelites were captured and led into slavery in Babylon. They longed for Jerusalem. Likewise, Africans were captured from their homelands and taken to places like Jamaica, "Babylon." This anger at his father is natural. Not only did he abandon his son, but he abandoned his son apparently because he did not have the strength to resist his family's racism.
When Bob was thirteen, he joined his mother in Kingston, in the slum called Trenchtown, made famous in many of Marley's songs. It was here that he met Bunny Wailer and Peter Tosh, who formed the group The Wailers. It was here that he struggled to become a musician.
Many people have written about Bob's life and I don't wish to re-create his biography here, especially since I am no expert. Rather, I want to talk about the connections between Bob Marley and Africa.
The first most important connection is his own anger and despair at the continuing slavery of the African diaspora, despite the abolishment of slavery a century before he was born. As he sings in "Slavedriver":
Ev'ry time I hear the crack of the whip My blood runs cold I remember on the slave ship How they brutalised our very souls Today they say that we are free Only to be chained in poverty Good god, I think it's all illiteracy It's only a machine that make money
Slave driver the table is turned
In this song, he recognizes that physical freedom had not produced freedom-that the African diaspora was still chained by bondages such as poverty and illiteracy. Slavery was alive and well-it had just acquired a new face.
He explores the concept of freeing the mind in such songs as Exodus, which is of course a reference to the biblical Israelites' escape from slavery in Egypt. He sings, "We're leaving Babylon, we're going to our fatherland." Unlike Marcus Garvey, Bob Marley did not exactly advocate literal, physical movement to
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