Rebel without a pause
Reviewed by Shelley Walia

Bob Marley: Herald of a Postcolonial World
By Jason Toynbee. Polity Press, Cambridge. Pages 263. $22.95

Many years ago, I had a friend at Cambridge who introduced me to the Rastafarian ethos; it was part of the ambience of her apartment especially her dreadlocks and her khaki camouflage and weeds so striking in the otherwise traditional Anglo-Saxon stronghold. The music from Trinidad that played all the time in her room seemed always to be a tribute to a ghetto-bred boy who had stood for peace, love and justice, and for the struggles of the impoverished and the powerless. It spoke to me of the mission that Bob Marley had, a mission to "tell the truth about the world". And the truth about the man and his music is brought out by a sheer tour-de-force of biographical detail mixed with cultural theory by Jason Toynbee in his book entitled Bob Marley.

Whenever I go back to Marley’s music, I am reminded of Jean Genet’s words: "Are you there Africa with the bulging chest and oblong thigh? Sulking Africa, wrought of iron in the fire, Africa of the millions of royal slaves, deported Africa, drifting continent are you there? Slowly you vanish, you withdraw into the past, into the tales of castaways, colonial museums, the works of scholars; but I call you back this evening to attend a secret revel." Africa has always been the hope and the destination of millions of the displaced who yearned for the return to their homeland. Marley’s ties with Jamaica go back to his affiliations with the Rastafarian movement, a rebellious and messianic cult, which called for a final return to the African roots, "to unite and regain their glory". But Ethiopia was always in the backdrop of his music and his life, symbolizing the African’s spiritual home. Marcus Garvey, Jamaican civil rights leader, had predicted in 1930 that his fellow brothers must start "looking to Africa for the crowning of a king to know their redemption is near." This turned out to be a reality for the Rastafarians with the rise of Haile Selassie who became the Emperor of Ethiopia after the collapse of Imperial rule in 1974.

Jason Toynbee not only brings out the complexity of his music in this fascinating book, but takes the reader to some interesting details of the history of the rise of one of the most influential musicians of the twentieth century. Bob Marley, as a founding member of a group called the Wailing Wailers, first hit the Jamaican charts in 1964 with his heavy reggae and its blood-and-fire rhetoric; for the last 40 years his music has shown no signs of becoming outdated as is obvious from the celebrations and the world-wide following that he still enjoys. Music for Marley was evocative of the timeless and universal quality of peace and brotherhood, of unity and independence. A visionary and a revolutionary artist, he has become the icon of the African Diaspora, a national heritage both for Jamaica and Ethiopia. His fist raised in triumph, together with the troubled rhythms of his songs which are attributed to the Rastafarian influence, are a sign of his defiance that is at the heart of his music:

Toynbee’s focus in the book is, foremost, to come to grips with Bob Marley as a "social author" schooled as he is in downtown Kingston. His life spanning the wide spectrum from Jamaica to the international stage, is imbued with an African-Caribbean style of music developed on the island of Jamaica and so closely linked to the religion of Rastafarianism expressed through Reggae music that Marley is associated with and which draws on the experience of the black people of Jamaica and Great Britain. It is steeped in Jamaican Creole with rhythms that are moody and heavy, a tightly constructed rhetoric that fuses the African oral tradition with the Pentecostal, aiming to rouse the black audience with its history of the journey from Africa to Jamaica to Britain and then back to its homeland. The struggle for identity that it epitomises becomes vital for the blacks whose interest has been in the expressive forms and rituals of the Diaspora used to counter "white and dumb rages" and fuzzy suspicions. The confidence behind reggae screamed for the vital human need for due recognition denied to the oppressed:

The righteous’ wealth is in his Holy Place.

Clearly written and well theorized, the book brings out Marley’s devotion to the Rastafarian religion and its ideological underpinnings which became the staple of his song writing and received global appreciation especially because of its message of brotherhood and peace for all of mankind. He "stands as an example of how to fight and how to overcome division and fear" thereby becoming a formidable force of resistance against racism and colonialism.

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