On May 11, 1981, the world lost one of the greatest preachers it had ever seen
As Realtime.ng commemorates 40 years of passage of music legend, Bob Marley; we veer-off the regular ‘menu’ of running through profiles to present to you, a rather obscure segment of his eventful life.
The “Preacher” is probably not the first word that most would use to describe Robert “Nesta” Marley, the Jamaican reggae singer and leader of Bob Marley & The Wailers. Though listening to him had the feel of attending a revival, a call gathering all nations in the harmony of one sound.
Rural Jamaica and its deep, multifaceted spirituality gave birth to Marley’s vocation as a preacher. By day, the communal rhythms of bush agriculture, stories of Africa and the Bible and the sounds of hymns governed the small village of Nine Mile, where he was born. At night, the “duppies”- spirits of the dead – swirled in the darkness. This is a world where you may be called at any time, for, as Timothy White quotes Thaddeus Livingston in his biography of Marley, Catch a Fire, the “spirits tek action even when yuh nuh summon dem.”
Callings were in Marley’s lineage. Omeriah, Marley’s maternal grandfather and the closest thing he had to a father figure, was a myalman, or medicine man. His healing practice was a gift of the Lord Most High, a calling to do the “upful” work of restoring what others had broken in the spiritual realm. Marley’s mother, Cedella, “caught religion” with the Pentecostal church, where the power of the Holy Spirit descended on devotees and in harvest season produce was tied to the altar to give thanks.
Cedella saw something in her son; he had “a preachar’s fire in him eye,” she said when Marley was about 5. “It mek me lickle ’fraid sometime.” Her son’s skill at palm reading and seeing the future shocked villagers, including a local police chief. According to Dean MacNeil’s The Bible and Bob Marley, one of his teachers noted that Marley, who had not yet been baptized – only adults were baptized in that world – was interested in reading “as long as it was linked to his copious knowledge of the Bible.” As a young musician, he and the Wailers performed in a cemetery at night to overcome their stage fright. The ceremonial concert for the “duppies” became an early song. “Through the powers of the Most High, they’ve got to turn me loose,” the self-proclaimed “Duppy Conqueror” announced. “I’ve got to reach Mount Zion.”
At the age of 12, Marley moved with his mother to Trenchtown, the toughest neighborhood in the crumbling colonial edifice that was the metropolitan area of Kingston. Seething racial stratification, a broken economy largely controlled by 21 families and manipulation by multinational companies hoping to squeeze out every last possible drop of wealth had left the area destitute. It was like a growing pile of bagasse, the pulpy sugarcane residue that remained after all the sugar had been extracted, and that could be burned for fuel. Marley more than held his own amid the escalating chaos and earned the name Tuff Gong, adding a new tenacity to his preacher’s fire. He began to live out more and more the rudeboy proverb: “If a fire, mek it burn.”
Marley channeled that fire into music. As his prominence grew, so did Jamaica’s sociopolitical conflict, fueling his evolution from pop crooner to preacher. His early songs offered ghetto authenticity, religious overtones and communal celebration.
Marley exploded onto the global scene in the mid-70s, becoming the voice of the seismic changes in the postcolonial world. In the words of Timothy White, Marley was “quoted like a poet, heralded as the Mick Jagger of reggae, the West Indian Bob Dylan, even the Jamaican Jomo Kenyatta.”
The “open” way his songs functioned was key. The Rastafari faith was mysterious enough to outsiders that listeners across the globe, even when learning the details of the tradition, could still read a Christian ontology into it. It is probably not what Marley originally intended for most of his songs, but listeners easily heard “God” for “Jah,” the shortened form of Jehovah that stood for Ethiopian Emperor Selassie’s alleged divinity. At least I and those I talked to did, reflecting on what Marley was telling us about God. Biblical allusions and narratives made this natural.
When Marley sang “Send us another brother Moses,” we joined with the Israelites and all the slaves who prayed this prayer through the centuries, and gained new faith that God would hear us too. I saw lines like “read it in Revelation, you’ll find your redemption” enable people to engage with more personal spiritual yearnings. Marley, a trusted voice, reopened a conversation that culture wars and church scandal often made difficult to take seriously.
Perhaps the most powerful characteristic of Marley’s preaching was that, despite the obvious spiritual focus and the global scope of the suffering he addressed, he conjured in his audience a counterintuitive, laid-back ease with the world as it is. This was something not very common in the church settings. He exuded comfort in his own skin and bestowed that ability on his listeners. They left feeling elevated, more connected to both themselves and those around them, sent on a mission.
Marley’s spiritual journey as a preacher continued until the end of his life. Visits to Africa shook him free of the Rastafari teaching that Ethiopia was heaven on earth. Selassie, who was publicly recognized Rastafari leaders during his visit to Jamaica in 1966 (one of the first-ever public recognitions of the Rastafari in Jamaica), sent Archbishop Abuna Yesehaq to the country to bring the Rastafari into the Ethiopian Orthodox fold. Marley’s wife Rita and their children were baptized in 1973. As a result, Marley was inside Orthodox circles for close to a decade, undergoing not a radical conversion but a return – a return to his mother’s Christology and a new reckoning with his morals, particularly his main fault, sexual.
As the public face of the Rastafari movement, Marley held back from acting publicly on his spiritual evolution for a number of years. Some Rastafari considered Christian baptism to be a betrayal of the movement. Marley’s cancer diagnosis shattered those impediments. When Marley accepted baptism on Nov. 4, 1980, taking the name Berhane Selassie (“Light of the Trinity”), pent-up pain from a life of intense struggle burst forth, and he cried for half an hour. He had made it home: the full flowering of his rural Jamaican spiritual roots in Africa’s ancient Christian faith.
Marley died young, at the age of 36, depriving the world of decades of potential spiritual evolution. But he lives on, in some ways more powerful. Through his early death, the Spirit raised Marley up, keeping him forever young, unencumbered by the ambiguity of daily life and what comes from continuing public exposure.
Marley is now part of that great spiritual exchange, a myalman whose call for justice and harmony circulates, free-floating. He is carrying on his grandfather’s “upful” work on a global scale, riding through the storm until the end of time.