Bob Marley and the Birth of Black Consciousness

          I’ve always believed that watching the movie Malcolm X sometime during high school, and my subsequent seeking out and reading of his autobiography, was the beginning of my consciousness as a Black person.  Indeed, it was a time of great self awareness and awakening.  Before, I had not thought much about my racial identity outside of what we were taught about the ethnic groups in primary school in Belize.  I knew I was half Creole—my mother being of the light-skinned straight-haired variety from the village of Burrell Boom; and half Garifuna—my father being a very dark skinned man originally from Dangriga, who understood the Garifuna language but rarely spoke it. 

     My father is so dark, his passport picture looks like an ink blot on the page.  We laughed about it, although really, it wasn’t funny that the equipment at the Immigration Office wasn’t capable of capturing the likeness of a dark-skinned person.  He also once told me that years ago, when he was dating my mother, some people would remark, “konkas (a very large type of housefly) inna milk”.  It wasn’t said with any malicious intent, but I suppose it’s the kind of self-deprecating humor that Black people have come to adapt.

     My mother, a teacher, was very proud of her culture, and went to pains to also teach us about my father’s culture.  As children, my brother and I attended Garifuna language classes.  To this day, I can sing the Belizean national anthem, count from one to ten, and introduce myself in Garifuna.  My neighbor, Ms. Emily, also happened to be a proud Garifuna woman who hosted dance classes, and so we received much of our indoctrination into our father’s culture via her.  As for the Creole culture, we absorbed that through language and tradition—my grandfather’s stories told under the house on the large septic tank on Freetown Road in Belize City; my grandmother’s cooking.  As light-skinned as my mother’s side of the family is, none of them would ever claim to be white, although it is said that my grandfather’s ancestor was a Scottish man.  If you’d ask them, they’d all say they’re Creole, which in Belize can mean any variety of colour, and which literally means mixed.

     I never really thought about these things until high school.  And sure, it was Denzel’s realistic depiction of Malcolm that triggered something in my consciousness, but without a doubt, it was my father’s music that planted the early seeds.  Sundays were his time to “beat out”, as we say in Belize; that’s when he would play his music loud enough that it reverberated throughout the house.  Bob Marley was one of his favorites, and also Burning Spear.  I remember when he first brought home a Muta Baruka CD and started playing it.  My brother and I didn’t get it.  We laughed at the strange mix of chanting and music and skits and what perhaps was poetry, we weren’t quite sure.

One day, I remember picking up the booklet that came with one of the Bob Marley CDs and reading the lyrics of his songs. 

Until the philosophy

That holds one race superior

And another inferior

Is finally and permanently

Discredited and abandoned.

Everywhere is war!

Until the colour of a man’s skin

Is of no more significance

Than the colour of his eyes

Me say war!

Until the basic human rights

Are equally guaranteed to all

Without regards for race

War!

Until that day

The dream of lasting peace

World citizenship

And the rule of international morality

Will remain but a fleeting illusion

To be pursued but never attained

Well everywhere is war!

     At the time, I wasn’t aware Bob was singing the words of Haile Selassie.  I didn’t even know who Selassie was, nor Marcus Garvey, from whom he also borrowed liberally, but I remember I started paying more keen attention to Bob’s lyrics and regarding my father’s music as not just his Sunday noise and old people boring music, the way my own daughter now regards my old Tupac tapes.  Like me, in a few years she’ll begin to get it.  She’ll also begin to understand what Bob Marley was singing about.  Unlike me, she’s already aware of Marcus Garvey, since he’s a national hero of Jamaica and they learn about him in school. 

     What Bob Marley did for so many people around the world was awaken a self consciousness quite like the moment when Adam and Eve first realized they were naked in the Garden of Eden.  Their nudity was something that had never bothered them before; likewise, the ignorance of the state of the Black person was a simple fact of life for many.  In some places—South Africa, the southern United States—where the dichotomy between Black and White was a lot more obvious, and obviously unjust, many had already come into this consciousness; but in places like my little Belize, where racism was a lot more latent, Bob was the one who began to change our paradigms.  For me, it was like a child learning to read.  Have you ever been around a child learning to read?  It’s like a whole new world begins to open up before their eyes.  They begin reading signs on buildings and streets, everything they can get their hands on.  They ask a lot of questions about words they can’t pronounce and what they mean.  They are suddenly experiencing the world in a different way; things make sense that never made sense before. 

     That’s the power of Bob.  The reason his music continues to sell as much as it does, is that every day, a new generation of young people discover him, relate to him.  Thirty-one years after his death, and on this, what would have been his sixty-seventh birthday, Bob Marley remains culturally relevant to millions of people around the world who, through his music, are just becoming conscious of their Blackness and how that affects their social relations, their perceptions and their identity.

     It’s incredible how much Black consciousness, philosophy, ideology has come out of the small island of Jamaica, where I now reside with my family.  Bob, Marcus, Louise Bennett (whose Back to Africa I discovered in Standard 6).  Yet, so many years later, I find Jamaicans still afflicted by an identity crisis.  This is a majority Black country that refuses to identify itself as such, and instead chooses to live under the illusion, the national motto, “out of many one”.  And while I’m not trying to deny the existence of other cultures in Jamaica, the simple fact is that they are a very small minority in a country where, in my opinion, society has created an artificial division between Black and “brown”, associating them in the antithetical geographical constructs of “uptown” and “downtown” Kingston, the haves versus the have nots.  Three and a half years living in Jamaica and I’m still not comfortable with being called “brownin”.  Bob Marley was the son of a White man and a Black woman; he grew up in “country” and moved as a child to a tenement yard in Trenchtown, and so despite his “brown” colour, would have been shaped by the social experience of living “downtown” and growing up poor.  So perhaps it is through that existence and what he came to represent following his convergence to Rastafarianism that no one would dare call Bob Marley “brown”, nor would they deny that he was a Black man; I’m sure he’d have it no other way.

     And that's MY perspective.