HERE are a few lines from one of the most popular compositions in the Bob Marley songbook. The album of the same name has been listed by Times Magazine as one of music’s greatest albums.
I don’t agree that is Marley’s best album and many of my Marley’s choices are not from that album, although I concede that the arrangement on the song is fantastic but that is for another discussion, another time.
We know where we’re going, uh!
We know where we’re from
We’re leaving Babylon
We’re going to our Fatherland
Marley did not live long enough to see that Jah people did not leave Babylon and were prevented from going to their fatherland. The story of Bob Marley’s music and its relationship with the Mulatto/Creole class (MCC) of the Caribbean is one of the most bizarre moments in the cultural and sociological history of the 20th century.
Marley’s music was an appeal for an alternative society where human values cannot be born until people (not only African people but people in general) liberate their psychology from the mental subjugation that arose hundreds of years ago and through its acceptance has permanently imprisoned the modern mind of the non-White races.
I haven’t done the research but wondered if Edward Said, the great Palestinian thinker (though his field was literature, he was very close to being an erudite philosopher) ever wrote anything about Marley. It would be absorbing to hear how he treated Marley’s philosophy since one suspects, in a weird way, Said may have problems with dark skin colour. I couldn’t believe when I read that he referred to the face of the great French philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre as ugly.
Marley had a philosophy which he put to the world in music rather than in book form. The subplot was the elevation of Rastafari culture. No one before Marley and no one after Marley has successfully promulgated the inherent goodness in Rastafari ontology the way Marley did. But it began and ended there.
Turning out phenomenal songs, one after another, the genius of Marley put Rastafari culture on the face of the Caribbean. However, the penetration only occurred among the working people of Jamaica and the Caribbean. Almost 99 per cent of the practitioners of Rastafari in the CARICOM region came from the proletariat and the unemployed members of the lumpen-proletariat.
Marley not only failed to find conversion among the MCC, but that class took an oppressive attitude towards Rastafari adherents and severely repressed them. Marley, quite conscious of this, made a number of huge hits denouncing Babylon, which in Rastafari culture is the oppressive system.
Throughout the CARICOM region, the state used a vicious hand in repressing Rastafari culture. The police in Guyana, during the Burnham presidency, were particularly harsh on Rastas. They would be arrested without due process and humiliated by having their hair shaved.
In a speech denouncing the WPA, Burnham said if he should be removed, another Rasta would take his place. But the state under Burnham was cruel to the Rastas. The ultimate oppression of the Rastas in Guyana came under the Hoyte presidency when the most draconian legislation on the use of marijuana in the entire Caribbean came in. A jail sentence was automatic for even one gram.
So, the question is why Marley failed in his philosophical message. The answer lies in the psychological complexity of Homo Sapiens. The mind makes a neat separation of the “vibes” it encounters in the world. Take Paul McCartney of the Beatles fame and Bob Dylan in the age of the hippies or what is referred to as the counter culture era between 1966 and 1970.
Dylan and McCartney were symbols of the hippie age and their music was an integral part of hippie culture. But both Dylan and McCartney had no interest in the counterculture and the world of the hippie generation. Both said they simply made music that they liked and it began and ended there. This is one of the reasons for the huge split between McCartney and John Lennon. McCartney was conservative and Lennon was a hippie.
The irony with Bob Marley was that the Mulatto/Creole class made his music ubiquitous in the Caribbean. Marley’s music enthralled the MCC. Because of their vast status in CARICOM countries, the MCC marketed Marley’s music. But the mind separated the music from the philosophy. The MCC had no time for Rastafari culture and, in fact, found it to be a weird sect and frowned on it.
This was more pronounced ironically in Jamaica. Today, of the entire CARICOM region, the power of the MCC in Jamaica has not been diluted since colonial days. To conclude, the MCC was zealous about the music of Marley but was disdainful of his philosophy.
