New Book: Rastafari in the 21st Century: What Life Has Taught I&I

 

Critics are saying that Volume One of  Rastafari in the 21st Century: What Life Has Taught I&I is a prime example of current Rastafari scholarship at its best. The ambitious new book by Priest Douglas Smith and I. Jabulani Tafari contains the previously unwritten history of the first generation of Rastafari elders. Today, many of that First Generation of Rastafari elders are transitioning on to become Ancestors, and as they do so, their colorful and important life stories are already starting to fade from the collective memory of the people of Jamaica and the world.

This well-illustrated and thought-provoking volume was written as a literary tribute lest the world forget to highlight and honor those Rastafari elders who sacrificed everything and endured so much with so little in order to establish a new cultural tradition and way of life. The colorful biographies of the individual Rastafari patriarchs and matriarchs included in this tribute to the elders provide a panoramic, comprehensive and illuminating insight into the cultural mindset and political worldview of the Rastafari.

The revealing biographies of the selected Rastafari elders also give mind-boggling and eye-opening accounts of the harrowing and dangerous life of the once socially ostracized and publicly despised Rastafari activists. The range of exhilarating experiences highlighted in the biographies of these elders illustrate the serious daily challenges faced for decades by the pioneers of the movement and document how these Rastafari activists endeavored to persevere and overcome all the religious, social, economic and political obstacles set up to hinder and eradicate them.

As second generation Rastafari youth growing up in the 1970s, authors Priest Douggie Smith and Ras I. Jabulani Tafari were blessed to sit at the feet of many of the first generation Rastafari elders and they often heard them expound extensively about the Mystic Revelation of Rastafari and about the early days of the King of Kings Movement. The authors also heard the Elders reason about any number of topics related to the theology, ideology and spirituality of the King of Kings/Rastafari Movement. Accordingly, Volume One of  Rastafari in the 21st Century: What Life has Taught I&I  is a revealing testimony of the lessons in life that Priest Douggie and Ras I-Jabulani have been taught by their experiences interacting with the Elders while living the life of Rastafarians.

The authors are sharing some of their combined life experiences in this literary work and highlighting some of the enduring lessons they learned from the pioneering elders. Such a testament is necessary in order to take a fresh look at where the Rastafari movement is coming from and where it needs to be going moving forward. As veteran Rastafari activists, Priest Douggie and I-Jabulani have concluded that present circumstances require that Rastafari be much more than a mere religious movement… it has to be a resistance Movement and has to become a way to life, as well as a Way of Life.

The groundbreaking new book is copiously illustrated with 90-plus seldom seen photographs as well as eye-catching original artwork by the critically acclaimed Raw Pencil and master artist Elgo.

 

Rastafari in the 21st Century: What Life Has Taught I&I

By: Priest Douglas Smith and I. Jabulani Tafari

Volume One – Tribute to The Rastafari Elders

ISBN: 978-1-63901-378-4

232 Pages

90-Plus Photographs & Original Artwork

$30.00 Softcover

 

       

 

1 Minute Book Review: Exceptional Violence by Deborah A. Thomas

Name of the book: Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transnational Jamaica 

Author:  Deborah A. Thomas 

Publisher: Duke University Press Books 

What's the book about?  "Exceptional Violence is a sophisticated examination of postcolonial state formation in the Caribbean, considered across time and space, from the period of imperial New World expansion to the contemporary neoliberal era, and from neighborhood dynamics in Kingston to transnational socioeconomic and political fields. Deborah A. Thomas takes as her immediate focus violence in Jamaica and representations of that violence as they circulate within the country and abroad. Through an analysis encompassing Kingston communities, Jamaica’s national media, works of popular culture, notions of respectability, practices of punishment and discipline during slavery, the effects of intensified migration, and Jamaica’s national cultural policy, Thomas develops several arguments. Violence in Jamaica is the complicated result of a structural history of colonialism and underdevelopment, not a cultural characteristic passed from one generation to the next. Citizenship is embodied; scholars must be attentive to how race, gender, and sexuality have been made to matter over time. Suggesting that anthropologists in the United States should engage more deeply with history and political economy, Thomas mobilizes a concept of reparations as a framework for thinking, a rubric useful in its emphasis on structural and historical lineages."

Why am I reading the book?

I came of age during one of the most violent periods in Jamaican history. I've been trying to understand the causes of violence during the seventies and after. Exceptional Violence has given me many valuable insights about this complex issue. Thomas also examines the involvement of RastafarI in the reparations movement, their willingness to be classified as "indigenous," and an investigation of "Bad Friday" vis-a-vis violence in Jamaican culture.

Quote from the book: 

"What is needed to generate real justice, in other words, is a sustained conversation about history--and about the place of the past in the present--in terms other than those of righteous blame or liberal guilt."


Where to buy: http://www.amazon.com/Exceptional-Violence-Embodied-Citizenship-Transnational/dp/0822350866

Deborah A. Thomas is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Modern Blackness: Nationalism, Globalization, and the Politics of Culture in Jamaica and a co-editor of Globalization and Race: Transformations in the Cultural Production of Blackness, both also published by Duke University Press.

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I've modified this format from One Minute Book Reviews: http://oneminutebookreviews.wordpress.com/

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Bad Friday Florida Premier

Friday the 13^th

Of January will be "Bad Friday" in South Florida

With the premier full length screening

Of the brand new cutting edge documentary film

Bad Friday: Rastafari After Coral Gardens

 

With special guests

Film producer/director Deborah Thomas

& Coral Gardens committee chairman Ras Iyah-V

Screening and discussion at

Academic Building #1, Room 194, FIU North Campus,

3000 NE 151^st Street, North Miami Beach, Florida

Starting at 7:00 pm

Entry: Free

 

DVDs & Rastafari Memorabilia on Sale

 

Presented by

The Rootz Foundation, Inc,

In association with

The Global and Socio-cultural Students Club of FIU

 

Sponsored by

The Rootz Magazine, Talawah Roots Tonic, Whiz Communications, Lovelight Promotions, and WDNA 88.9 FM

New Ebook: Rastafari -- The New Creation by Barbara Makeda Blake Hannah

RASTAFARI - THE NEW CREATION (Gold Medal Edition) [Kindle Edition]

Barbara Makeda Blake Hannah (Author)

Digital List Price: $35.00 

Kindle Price: $35.00

Product Description

The first book on the Rastafari religion written by a member of the faith. First published in 1980, the book contains information on the principles and philosophy of the faith including chapters on Emperor Haile Selassie I, Marcus Garvey, Bob Marley, the founding fathers, the Ganja sacrament, and reggae music. Fully illustrated with rare colour and black & white photos and icons of the faith.

From the Author

This book was written in 1981 while I was researching Marcus Garvey at the Schomberg Museum in Harlem, New York. It grew out of five articles published in the STAR newspaper in Jamaica in 1977 and was first self-published in New York in 1981. The second edition was published in Jamaica, then in 1983 an edition was published in London, England.  Since then there have been two revised editions and the book took on colour covers.  The 6th edition was  published in 2007 in Jamaica.  This Gold Medal edition is, as all the others, fully revised with additonal information and pictures.

About the Author

BARBARA MAKEDA BLAKE HANNAH is a Jamaican who has been writing all her life and is the author of four books and numerous articles on Jamaican culture, entertainment and humanist philosophy. She is also a film maker, directing 8 films including the noted documentary 'Race, Rhetoric, Rastafari' for CHANNEL 4 UK in 1983.

After moving to London in 1964, Barbara gained notoriety in 1968 as the first Black journalist on British TV (THAMES, ATV, BBC). Returning to Jamaica in 1972, she adopted the Rastafari faith and wrote the first book on the religion written by a practising member. It has been re-published in 7 editions and though copies are sold only in Jamaica, the book has travelled the world and been read by people of all nations.

Her second book, the novel 'JOSEPH - A RASTA REGGAE FABLE', was inspired by the life of her friend Bob Marley and was re-published in 2005 by Macmillan. Her third book 'HOME - THE FIRST SCHOOL' recounts her experiences as Jamaica's homeschooling pioneer, educating her son Makonnen from birth until he made world history in 1998, when he was appointed Youth Technology Consultant to the Jamaican Government at age 13 years.

In 2010 Hansib Publishers UK published Barbara's fourth book 'GROWING OUT: Black Hair & Black Pride', a memoir of her early years and the decade she spent living in England.

Given the Ethiopian Orthodox Church baptizmal name Makeda in 1984, Mrs. Hannah was appointed an Independent Opposition Senator in the Jamaican Parliament, and gave birth to her son in 1985. The Ethiopian Crown Council awarded her a Gold Adowa Centenary Medal in 1998 for her services to the Ethiopian Royal family, and in 2010 the Rastafari Youth Initiative Council (Jamaica) awarded her the Empress Mennen Award.

She has lectured at the Universities of the West Indies (Jamaica & Guyana campuses), New York, Vienna - Austria, US Virgin Islands and Florida International University, and was a member of the Jamaican delegation to the United Nations World Conference Against Racism (WCAR) held in 2001 in Durban, South Africa.

Barbara has organized several film festivals in Jamaica since 1974. In 2008 she initiated an annual Reggae Film Festival screening films that include or document Jamaica's reggae music culture. In her spare time Barbara enjoys the beauty of Jamaica's countryside, beaches, foods and people. She writes a weekly entertainment blog and participates in television and radio programmes on Jamaican culture.

The Future of Rastafari

At a recent symposium at Nova Southeastern University, The Rastafari Impact on the Culture of Jamaica and the World, what began as an assessment of the movement was transformed into a lively discussion about the future of Rastafari. This was hardly surprising. From the time I was a yute in Jamaica, I've been a part of and sometimes witnessed these deep reasonings. And this was a vitally important discussion. Nearly all of the panelists, Ras Don Rico Ricketts, Dr. Roy Augier, Nana Farika, Mama Iyaddis, Dr. Michael Barnett, Dr. Jahlani "Bongo" Niaah, and Dr. K'adamawe K'nife, seemed to be wrestling with the issue of "how to be in the world, but not of it." The significance of this issue lies in the genesis of Rastafari, which was labeled as a cult by the British government, and its growth into a movement that has had a profound impact on global cultures, especially in the area of music.

The presentation began with a pointed analysis by Ras Don Rico Ricketts, who moderated the symposium. He was followed by Sir Roy Augier, the only surviving author of the seminal Report on the Rastafari Movement in Kingston, Jamaica.

Dr. Augier began by noting the contributions of M. G. Smith and Rex Nettleford, whose influence was noted by nearly every panelist. After a brief summary of the report, Dr. Augier challenged Rastafari to become more engaged in their communities and pointed to several forms of denial that were prevalent in the Caribbean and Rastafari. While he acknowledged that the idea of repatriation was a central tenet of Rastafari, Dr. Augier suggested that repatriation among Rastafari was a form of denial of the "lives that made a culture on these shores."

If it was a rebuke, then it was a mild one. For Dr. Augier had nothing but praise for Rastafari when he introduced the concept of negotiation, which set the tone for the challenges, which he suggested that Rastafari and the Caribbean must confront:

"Negotiation is a metaphor for navigation of the African presence in ourselves… We see it in the mirror and we don't like it…We are not whole. We are bifurcated."

Dr. Augier then asked the rhetorical question, "How do we negotiate the African presence in the Americas?" Rastafari, Dr. Augier argued began as an interrogation of the African presence in the Americas and that the movement posited an alternative value system of capitalist systems. He also contended that the movement could have positive effects on governance and the dietary habits of the Caribbean--noting the deleterious effects of fast food chains of the health of Caribbean peoples: "We are not eating right."

The discussion shifted its focus when Nana Farika, a senior Rastafari elder, stressed the importance of restoring the Omega balance, expressed in of Empress Menen of Ethiopia and Mama Iyaddis mused about Rastafari losing its impact by the growing commercialization of the movement. Dr. Michael Barnett and Dr. Jahlani "Bongo" Niaah also highlighted the significance of The Report on the Rastafari Movement in Kingston, Jamaica.

But it was Dr. K'adamawe K'nife, a lecturer in the Department of Management Studies at the University of the West Indies, whose startling break with the program captured the imagination of the audience.

In his presentation, "A New Hope for Humanity," Dr. K'nife offered an elegant assessment of Rastafari's centrality in Jamaican culture and offered Rastafari as an alternative to the current social, political, and economic systems:

Emphasis on the human rather than capital

Rastafari: an ethic for sustainable development

Application of Rastafari in conjunction with the deep ecology

Movement away from reliance on texts such as the King James Version to intuitive and metaphysical livity

Itral: The Law of Life

"Rastafari, the ancient future. Man of the past, living in the present, walking into the future."

Following Dr. K'nife's lecture, Ras Don Rico Ricketts invited audience participation in a Q&;A session, which continued until the conclusion of the program.

Rastafari, in its current incarnation, which was born in slave ships, flourished in the hills of Jamaica, and blossomed in reggae, has had a profound influence on my generation. Drawing on its roots in Garveyism, which emphasized self-reliance and entrepreneurship, unity and nationhood, Rastafari informed our sense of identity. And because Rastafari did not separate the physical from the spiritual in all their manifestations, the movement offered an attractive alternative to the Cartesian models of the West. Like many Caribbean Boomers, Rastafari has been, to borrow Dr. Augier's metaphor, a way of honoring the African presence in our lives and negotiating between a system that values capital over the human and Dr. K'nife's expansive interpretation of the movement.

Image created by Ras Don Rico Ricketts.

Book Review: Dub Wise @ sxsalon

 Dub Wise: The Rhythm Of Life by Jennifer Marshall

In his recent collection of poetry, Dub Wise, Geoffrey Philp explores themes of Caribbean identity in a postcolonial framework and the effect of these internal conflicts on communities and family relationships. The work speaks of modern-day environmental, spiritual, and political concerns, and Philp incorporates dimensions of reggae and the Rastafari movement to express stories of history, place, and the human condition.

In an interview with Caribbean Literary Salon, Philp reflects on growing up in Jamaica in the post-independence movement and how the creativity of this period inspired him as a fledgling writer:

I grew up at a time when there was widespread disillusionment with the promises of Independence and at a time of growing social unrest that saw the movement of Rastafari from the ghettos into the middle class. . . . The concept of InI that is at the heart of Rastafari and reggae has influenced my life and my art in so many ways.[1]

Having first experienced the “grumble of this subversive music” (71) flowing from his mother’s turntables as a boy, Philp’s love of rocksteady, reggae, and dub wise shaped his collection of work, each poem beginning with the germ of an idea and growing with his love of the music, inspired and shaped by its beats and political and spiritual messages of self-reliance and cultural pride.  Philp’s role in his day-to-day life as teacher and mentor resonate throughout his work and his poetry, suggesting a moral obligation to seek, and to guide others to seek, a self-assured place, a place he has certainly found as a writer.

Like Bob Marley, who preached the same tenets of self-reliance and determination, and whom Philp reveres as a fellow artist, spiritual icon, and revolutionary, Philp seeks to recreate the rhythms of life through his craft. He adopts Jamaican patois in the poems “Ode To Brother Joe” and “Mule Train: Version” to tell the story of disenfranchised Jamaicans in their own “voice.” Other poems in the collection read like lyrics from a song, as if written to the beat of a drum, embodying the very essence of “dub wise,” as Philp describes it: “the pared down essentials of drum and bass after which there is only the silence from which it emerged.”

For more, please follow this link,  Dub Wise: The Rhythm Of Life

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The Impact of Rastafari on the Culture of Jamaica and the World

Image via Wikipedia

SOUTH FLORIDA - Jamaica Awareness with South Florida's Caribbean American community will host a Caribbean-American Heritage month symposium that examines “The Impact of Rastafari on the Culture of Jamaica and the World”.

Half-a-century ago, the Rastafari Movement in Jamaica was brought to the attention of a larger part of the still-hostile Jamaican and world community – a citizenry which had developed a fearful attitude largely based on ignorance about the phenomenon and its adherents – by the publication of a report on the movement by three professors from the University of the West Indies.

The view of the “Rastas” that was made possible through the “Report on The Rastafari Movement in Kingston, Jamaica” was a view facilitated by the Jamaican Government of the time, who – in response to a request by “some prominent members of the Rastafari brethren” – asked the UWI to do the necessary research. The three young professors who carried out the interviews with the “Bredrin” and “Sistren” of the movement were Prof. M. G. Smith, Prof. Roy Augier, and Prof. Rex Nettleford.

Today, of the three authors of the 1960 report, only one is still alive – Prof. Roy Augier – and while the Rastafari Movement and its culture have remained alive, and while they have grown dramatically and spread all over the world, the questions around how they actually survived and spread; what the movement “really is”; and what its real impact has been in Jamaica and worldwide, have also remained and, in fact, the questioning has grown along with the movement.

To examine these questions, as part of South Florida’s celebration of Caribbean-American Heritage Month 2011, and a Special Tribute to Prof. Ralston “Rex” Nettleford O.M., Jamaica Awareness, Inc. presents a symposium on “The Impact of Rastafari on the Culture of Jamaica and the World” at Nova Southeastern University, on Friday, June 10, starting at 6:00 PM, in the Morris Auditorium, Health Professions Division, Assembly Building, 1st Floor, 3200 South University Dr., Ft. Lauderdale.

While the common and easily-accessed colors, symbols and attire, and especially the heavily Rasta-influenced Reggae music, and even what is categorized as a “new religion” – to the consternation of many highly-spiritual Rastafarians – provide ready evidence of the overt impact of this African-rooted cultural phenomenon, there are deeper aspects and their challenges which are beyond those that the general public realizes.

It is some of these deeper, and often more nuanced, resonances that emanate from the hidden core of the Rastafari, as well as many of the more recognized repercussions from this worldwide phenomenon that the panel discussion will examine, following a keynote address from Prof. Roy Augier, surviving author of the 1960 Report.

Panelists who will bring their various “raspectives” are: Nana Farika Berhane, journalist, teacher, RasTafari Queen Mother; Mama Iyaddis, multi-media producer, community activist; Prof. Michael Barnett, Department of Sociology, Psychology & Social Work; Dr. K’admawe K’nIfe, Lecturer, Department of Management Studies, UWI; Dr. Jahlani Bongo Niah, Lecturer, Institute of Caribbean Studies, UWI; Robin “Bongo Jerry” Small, Historian, radio host, commentator, and social activist. Ras Don Rico Ricketts will moderate the reasoning.

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• The Rex Nettleford Fellowship in Cultural Studies 2011 (repeatingislands.com)
• PUB: The Rex Nettleford Fellowship in Cultural Studies 2011 " Repeating Islands (kalamu.posterous.com)
• "Jamaica Journal" Launches Second Music Issue (repeatingislands.com)
• I Marcus Garvey: New Play (repeatingislands.com)
• Forthcoming Film: RasTa, A Soul's Journey (repeatingislands.com)
• The Third Annual Anancy Festival (repeatingislands.com)
• The Third Annual Anancy Festival: June 11, 2011 (geoffreyphilp.blogspot.com)
• Unity: Bob Marley's Legacy and the Global Uprising (Feature) (popmatters.com)

Bob Marley: National Hero

On February 6, 2011, Jamaica’s Minister of Youth, Sports and Culture declared her advocacy for naming Bob Marley as a national hero of Jamaica. According to the Jamaica Observer, “Minister Grange told a national radio audience and those gathered at the Bob Marley Museum in Kingston…that Marley was a "great Jamaican" and that she ‘supported the idea of making him a National Hero.’” While some have suggested that this honor is long overdue, others have questioned the merits of bestowing the nation’s highest honor on Marley: “By definition a national hero is someone who subordinates their personal interests to the collective interest of a country, I am sure that was not Bob’s intention implicit or otherwise.”

Definitions are important. The reasons for elevating someone to the level of national hero should be based on the values that the person embodies and to which we give our assent. For example, Norman Manley and Sir Alexander Bustamante were leaders of the independence movement that transformed Jamaica from a colony of the British Empire into a politically independent state. In singling out Manley and Bustamante as national heroes, we also honored the many nameless freedom fighters who struggled beside them for many years. In the end, Bustamante and Manley were triumphant, but the process of realizing statehood, becoming Jamaicans instead of wishing to be British, still continues. Transformation takes time and eventually, Bustamante and Manley were named national heroes. So what are the values that Marley embodies? And can these values be applied to the other heroes that preceded him?

"Someone who subordinates their personal interests to the collective interest of a country" is a workable definition. But it is not the only one. Joseph Campbell, author of The Power of Myth, defines a hero  as “someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself” (151). Campbell also outlined the cycle of the “hero journey, (separation, transformation and return) and divides “hero deeds” into two categories: spiritual and physical. Unlike a physical deed in which there are outward manifestations, the spiritual deed has to be recognized by the community as meaningful. Or as Rastafari would say, seen.

The other kind is the spiritual deed in which the hero learns to experience the supernormal range of human spiritual life and then comes back with a message.

The usual hero adventure begins with someone from whom something has been taken, or who feels there’s something lacking in the normal experiences available or permitted to the members of his society. This person then takes off on a series of adventures beyond the ordinary …to recover what has been lost (152).

So what is the “hero deed” to which Marley gave himself and which was also “bigger” than him? The answer comes in the song that Marley recorded near the end of his physical life--an allegory not only about his life, but the story of New World Africans in the Americas: “Emancipate yourself from mental slavery/ none but ourselves can free our mind” (“Redemption Song”). It is worth noting that the lyrics are taken from a speech by the Hon. Marcus Mosiah Garvey, Jamaica’s first national hero, whose career began 
after he witnessed the subhuman treatment of New World Africans throughout the Americas:

I was determined that the black man would not continue to be kicked about, as I had seen in Central America, and as I read of it in America. Where is the black man's government? Where is his King and his kingdom? Where is his President, his country, his men of big affairs? I could not find them, and then I declared, 'I will help to make them.' My brain was afire. 

Marley, as a Rastafari, expanded the work of Marcus Garvey. He also put one of Garvey’s central teachings, self-determination, into practice by founding his own record label, Tuff Gong.

As committed Rastafari, Bob Marley along with Peter Tosh and Neville Livingston, the original Wailers, became the voice of the sufferahs in Trench Town. They had witnessed firsthand the effects of slavery and British colonialism on New World Africans and sought political redress through appeals for equal rights and justice.  Always wary of politicians and the "system,” the Wailers were aware that politics was not the only way to achieve the kind of transformation they were seeking. They knew that Jamaica was a deeply spiritual culture, so the choice for name of the group, “Wailers,” was not by accident.  They were urban prophets “crying in the wilderness,” and their music became a sonic representation of the experience of Rastafari.

And what was the genius of Rastafari? Inviolable self-identity expressed as InI. This is a radical idea, especially for New World Africans who were brought to the Americas as property of the Empire and subjected to the worst forms of inhumanity. And yet, they survived.

But surviving is not living. Something had to be done. This was the great truth that Marcus Garvey realized and that Marley expounded in “Slave Driver”:

Ev'rytime I hear the crack of a whip,
My blood runs cold.
I remember on the slave ship,
How they brutalize the very souls.
Today they say that we are free,
Only to be chained in poverty.
Good God, I think it's illiteracy;
It's only a machine that makes money

Slavery and colonialism had placed New World Africans in a state of almost childlike dependency in which the colonized looked to the Empire for approval. Again, Campbell is useful: “To evolve out of this position of psychological immaturity to the courage of self-responsibility and assurance requires a death and a resurrection” (138). Campbell elaborates, “If you realize what the real problem is--losing yourself, giving yourself to some higher end, or to another—you realize that this is the ultimate trial…a transformation of consciousness. You have been thinking one way, you now have to think a different way” (139). Although some may wish to deny it, Rastafari and the work of Bob Marley have helped to shape the modern Jamaican character. For many of the post-independence generation who take their somebodiness for granted--as well they should--this may be a "teachable" moment.

In sum, what  Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, Bunny Livingston, Bob Andy and others did in popular culture, artists such as George Campbell, Derek Walcott, Kamau Brathwaite, Édouard Glissant, Rex Nettleford, Ivan Van Sertima, Albert Huie, and Martin Carter have done in literature, art, and dance: to see with our own eyes and bless with our own hands.

It is a process that the Kenyan novelist, Nguigi wa Thiongo calls, the “decolonization of the mind.” The Indian writer, Namit Arora describes the depth psychological dependency that many in the former British Empire find themselves:

When done right, the native comes to elevate and mimic his master’s ways, to see his own culture as inferior, and to look down on his past as ‘a wasteland of non-achievement’. He begins to defer to the colonizer’s ideas on fundamental things like beauty, art, and politics. In time, he begins to understand himself and his culture through the eyes of the colonizer—using the latter’s concepts, categories, and judgments. Before too long, he turns into a proxy for his master: colonialism with a native face.

How does the colonizer gain such control? The easiest method is to actively spread his language among the natives, and to simultaneously denigrate the language of the natives as crude and unfit for proper education. It is amazing how much mileage this delivers. Make the colonizer’s language the lingua franca of imperial administration, accord prestige and upward mobility to those who learn it in colonial schools, and before too long, there is a feeding frenzy among a native minority. Such has been the way of the great colonialists of history: the Arabs in the 7-8th centuries, the British and the French in the 19th, the Russians with the Baltic States in the 20th.

It is little wonder that the Wailers always heaped scorn on our educational system: “Brainwash education to make us the fool” (“Crazy Baldheads”).  The Wailers also derided the psychological dependency that the “system” produced: “Most people think great God will come from the sky/take away everything and make everybody feel high" (Get up, Stand up”). Rather than wait to go to heaven for the rewards of life, the Wailers asserted, “ Preacher man don’t tell me/ Heaven is under the earth/I know you don’t know what life is really worth" (“Get up, Stand up”).

The teaching of Marcus Garvey and Rastafari returned agency to the individual: “But if you know what life is worth/ you will look for yours on earth/ so now you see the light/Stand up for your right!” (“Get up, Stand up). In other words, InI don’t need to be rescued and there isn't any miraculous help coming from above or anywhere else. InI have to save InI: “Every day is work” (“Work”).

Marley exemplified the human desire for freedom, which is why so many around the world are drawn to his music. But make no mistake, his first audience was always New World Africans, and his refusal of life saving surgery may be viewed as a kind of sacrifice to the idea that Rastafari incarnates: the black body is a holy site (temple) and should not be mutilated (as it had been in the slavedom days) for any reason—even at the cost of saving a physical life. Extreme, yes, but that’s why we have heroes. They do things we wouldn’t.

This is Marley’s hero deed: he transformed our consciousness in the areas of self-determination, identity, and agency. Whatever the reasons for his success, he became the most successful and articulate spokesperson for the Jamaican Boomer generation. He changed how we see ourselves, not as victims of the system, autonomons of the Empire, but as human beings with the ability to chart and live our own lives: "Every man got a right to choose his own destiny" ("Zimbabwe"). But a hero can only take us so far. The rest of the battle is up to us. He wrote psalms to comfort us when we were weary and hymns to lead us into the battle against Babylon.

“Emancipate yourself from mental slavery” or the “decolonization of the mind”  is the great cause to which Bob Marley devoted his life and we now confront the choice--and by doing so we define ourselves--in the fiftieth year of Jamaica’s independence whether his actions were either a colossal failure or triumph. It is one of those generational choices that do not come very often. I know what Bob would say, “Sing along with me children” ("Redemption Song").

Campbell, Joseph. The Power of Myth. New York: First Anchor Books, 1991.  All other quotes in this article that are not otherwise attributed come from this book.

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Related articles

• Jamaica: Call to Make Bob Marley a National Hero (repeatingislands.com)
• I & I: The Natural Mystics - Marley, Tosh and Wailer by Colin Grant - review (guardian.co.uk)
• The Bob Marley Mausoleum in Nine Mile, Jamaica (repeatingislands.com)
• I & I: The Natural Mystics by Colin Grant (geoffreyphilp.blogspot.com)
• Happy birthday, Bob Marley! (poefrika.blogspot.com)
• "Could you be Loved?": Human and Divine Love (geoffreyphilp.blogspot.com)
• Happy Birthday Bob Marley!! 6 February 1945 - 11 May 1981 | RIP (theoriginalwinger.com)
• http://geoffreyphilp.blogspot.com/2010/03/bob-marley-and-heros-journey.html
• Bob Marley Symposium at Americas Society (geoffreyphilp.blogspot.com)
• http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/entertainment/Miss-Lou--Marley-for-national-heroes-says-Ibo-Cooper_8366362