Jamaica’s the Place When We Think Reggae, Rasta -- and Bob

The Associated Press report came out of the blue. Rita Marley, in Addis Ababa, said the body of her husband, reggae icon Bob Marley, would be exhumed in Jamaica and moved to Shashemene, Ethiopia. “Bob’s whole life is about Africa,” she said. “It is not about Jamaica.... He has a right for his remains to be where he would love them to be.”

Within a day, she was backtracking, and the Bob Marley Foundation, which she heads, released a new statement: Jamaica would “remain the resting place for Bob Marley for the foreseeable future.” That’s because the reaction of Marley fans worldwide, and especially in Jamaica, was blistering and immediate.

On Jamaican radio, one DJ said, “We cannot even repeat on the air what most of our listeners have been saying.”

The Jamaica Gleaner, a major daily, editorialized that relocating Marley’s body would “take away an irreplaceable piece of Jamaica, as well as insult the many [Jamaicans] who have contributed to his success and worldwide fame.”

Another DJ asked, “Was it really Bob’s wish, or Rita’s assumption?”

That question, in a few forms, lingers. Rita Marley is promoting a concert next month in Addis Ababa to celebrate the 60th anniversary of her husband’s birth. Was the reburial announcement pure PR, wishful thinking, or could it be what Bob Marley really wanted? More important, could it happen?

I don’t believe it’s the right thing to do, and I don’t believe it would be Marley’s choice.

When his doctor, who had been treating him for melanoma in Germany, told him he was at the end of his life, Marley headed home to Jamaica. He died en route, in a Miami hospital, on May 11, 1981. He had the option of going to Africa before he died, but he chose the country that gave birth to him, to his music and to his religion.

Marley sang eloquently and often of African repatriation. As a Rastafarian, he believed in an African homeland in Ethiopia, and that Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie was “the true living God, without any apology.”

Yet his one visit to Ethiopia, made privately in 1978 not long after a Marxist coup had overthrown Selassie, was eye-opening. Marley was shocked to find that virtually no one he encountered in Ethiopia shared his Rasta beliefs.

Selassie, during his state visit to Jamaica in 1966, presented land in Shashemene to Rasta believers who wished to return to the motherland. Today, a few hundred live there in poverty, disunited and echoing ongoing divisions within the international Rasta movement. If Marley’s body were reinterred there, the factions would probably fight over which would control access to his resting place.

Any controversy over where Marley’s body should be buried may seem trivial, and yet much is at stake. Marley, reggae and Rasta belong to Jamaica’s cultural heritage, not Africa’s. And there is the matter of “keeping the customers satisfied.”

In 2004, Marley was the seventh highest-earning “dead celebrity.” His mother and members of his family live off the proceeds of running a guest house in the mountain village where he was born in Jamaica, now also the site of his mausoleum. Despite its remote location, it is the third most visited tourist site on the island.

Shortly after the reports of the planned reburial, I got an e-mail from reggae fan and singer Garland Jeffreys, who was not alone in suggesting a commercial motive tied to the upcoming concert in Ethiopia organized by Rita Marley. “PR manipulation” was the way he put it.

Certainly the concert had received scant international notice until last week. Since then, it has been mentioned in major newspapers around the world, as well as on CNN and other broadcast outlets. “You can’t buy that kind of publicity,” said Doug Wendt, a world beat authority.

But as Carolyn Cooper, head of the reggae studies department of the University of the West Indies, reminded listeners in a radio interview, Rita is Bob’s widow, the only woman he legally married, and she controls 55% of his estate and makes all major decisions regarding it.

In the end, though, what should be more important than his earning power or even a widow’s rights is the larger importance of Marley’s legacy.

The New York Times once declared the reggae prophet “the most influential musical artist of the second half of the 20th century.” In 1977, Time magazine chose his masterpiece, “Exodus,” as the “best album of the century.” The following year, Marley was awarded the United Nations Medal of Peace “on behalf of 500 million Africans.” And today, says the head of Amnesty International, “Everywhere I go, Bob Marley is the symbol of freedom.”

As the furor wound down last week, Rita Marley said her husband’s final resting place would be ultimately “up to the family to decide.”

I hope, along with his family of fans, that his role as a messenger of a religion born among Jamaican slaves and a music born on Jamaican streets will sway the decision. Bob Marley should remain on the island of his birth.