Charles Campbell
Sunday, February 18, 2007
It is a significant coincidence that we celebrate Bob Marley's birthday in the same month that we recognise the important contributions of Africans and their descendants to world history.
We attended the Bob Marley Day Concert at Ranny Williams Centre on February 6. The event was slated to begin at 8 pm and although we arrived on time, we were surprised to see the venue already had over 3000 people in the audience. Patrons, including uniformed school children and people coming directly from work, were assembled and in a festive mood.
The Tivoli Dance Troupe excelled during the early part of the show. However, the centrepiece of the event was the segment featuring the Marley brothers. Stephen, Damian and Julian did a set that would have made their father proud. They were joined on stage by Capleton, Turbulence and Fantan Mojah. The only fly in the ointment was Fantan's penchant to hog the mic.
By far the most profound minutes of the function were during 23 year old Etana's tribute to Marley, which began with Haile Selassie Is A Chapel. This Mortimer Planno- penned song was one of Bob's early works and is little known by many of his fans, as it is very rarely played on public radio. It is a favourite of mine and it was heart-warming to experience an artiste so young discover and interpret a nugget like this.
As a global icon, Marley truly epitomised his time and became a symbol of the internationalisation of the struggle of the oppressed and politically repressed. He came in an era where there was a worldwide peace movement - one that was opposed to the Vietnam War and coincided with the rise of both the Civil Rights Movement in the United States and the decolonisation struggles throughout the Caribbean and the African continent. Marley, along with other musical activists like Bob Dylan, Gil Scott-Heron, Joan Baez and Fela Kuti, presented themselves as the voices of the dispossessed in a changing global atmosphere. Their ammunition was powerful messages in the form of song-cult music which broke barriers and leaped from lateral popularity into the mainstream.
At a time when there was no worldwide web or even widespread use of other technology like digital voice recorders or computers, Marley popularised two of the three culturally significant inventions of the 20th century, Reggae music and the Rastafarian faith. He made a unique connection between the Caribbean populace and the Civil Rights movement leaders, Walter Rodney, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jnr.
Guyanese Rodney began his activism in the Kingston ghettos; Malcolm's earliest black conscious influences were the UNIA-spawned activism of his parents; and MLK admitted that he had never felt more like a complete man than in Jamaica.
Even more intriguing is the connection between Garvey and Marley. Hailing from the garden parish of St Ann, both men sought to align themselves with the cause of the 'downpressed' - Garvey deeply influenced the decolonisation struggle and Marley was heavily influenced by it. There is no doubt that Marley was inspired by the legacy of Garvey, and thus helped to reintroduce the importance of Garvey as the leader of the first global Pan-African movement, giving renewed credence to Garvey's philosophy and opinions, an entire generation after his death.
Marley's lyrics reverberated spiritually with the masses- this no doubt was because he borrowed heavily from His Imperial Majesty and Garvey, as well as producers Lee 'Scratch' Perry and Joe Higgs, Rastafarian elder Mortimer Planno and the Bible. However, like Dylan, his extensive use of folk parable made his compositions immediately recognisable. His music's potency and pungency was as undeniable as it was unmistakable - it bored into one's soul, making a connection that one often could not explain.
At the peak of his career, a brief five-year span between 1975 and 1980, he produced eight albums including Exodus, the acclaimed Album of the Century(Time magazine), which spent 56 weeks on the UK album charts between 1977 and 1978. This is the album that spawned the universal hit, One Love, which was dubbed Song of the Millennium by BBC. During that period, Marley was filling 100,000-capacity stadiums in Europe and America, which is pure evidence of the profound impact of his artistic insights.
There is an iconic Jamaican figure that is largely uncelebrated throughout our general historical celebrations but particularly in Black History Month. Of him, Pan-Africanist scholar, WEB Dubois said, "no man living has revealed as many important facts about the Negro race as has [JA] Rogers".
Joel Augustus Rogers was born on September 6, 1880[some sources say 1883 - Editor], in Negril, Westmoreland to Samuel Rogers, a school teacher and Methodist minister and Emily Johnstone. Like Garvey and Marley, Rogers spent his formative years living in St Ann. He read profusely from the large library of his uncle Henry Rogers, who was a surveyor.
Rogers migrated to New York City in 1906, where an act of discrimination in a Times Square greasy spoon filled him with rage and humiliation but inspired him to positively channel these emotions into a life-long quest for knowledge on the Black race.
During his life time, he wrote for a number of Black publications including The Messenger, The Chicago Defender and Garvey's Negro World, and from 1921 until his death on March 26, 1966, he wrote for the Pittsburgh Courier and the New Amsterdam News. Through his writings, Rogers popularised Black history and was recognised as an anthropologist and an authority on the history of African people and on race and race relations.
By way of extensive research, he accurately relocated Africa's proper place on the maps of human geography. For example, he demonstrated that early Egyptian religion, technology and science had profound influences on the development of Greco-Roman societies and not the other way around, as is often widely believed and taught. He further pontificated that the white man's civilisation was only a continuation of the African civilisations of antiquity.
Although Rogers spent the major portion of his life in Harlem, he travelled extensively, doing research in Europe and Africa. "His ability to disentangle the tricky, biased plots of history and retell history from a Black perspective was perhaps his greatest asset". [W Paul Coates, 1983]
Rogers was a mass propagandist who constructively used history to combat racism and ignorance, while inspiring his readers to a higher sense of self-awareness.
He produced a legacy of books and pamphlets which include World's Great Men Of Color (in two volumes), Sex And Race (in three volumes), Nature Knows No Color Line, Africa's Gift To America, 100 Amazing Facts About The Negro, The Real Facts About Ethiopia, The Ku Klux Spirit, Your History, As Nature Leads, The Five Negro Presidents Of The USA, which traces the genealogy of Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln; and the very popular historical novel, From Super Man To Man.
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