Bob Marley - "The Real Revolutionary"

Vibe.com, May 4th, 2006

Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, is a city of contrasts. There’s a modern airport, Internet cafes, nightclubs, museums, and some of the most luxurious hotels in all of Africa. But everywhere you walk, barefoot boys want to kiss your hand while their friends reach for your pockets. Even the villagers who share mud huts with their livestock don’t have that desperate look in their eyes; it’s a symptom of survival in this concrete jungle, home to one of the world’s largest orphan populations. Amharic and Arabic calls to prayer waft along the city’s dusty streets. Donkey carts, limousines, and U.N. Land Rovers idle at stoplights where angels with dirty faces peddle packets of tissue. A man in a rumpled business suit walks through downtown traffic, leading a flock of doomed sheep to slaughter. And looming over them all—young and old, rich and poor, Muslim and Christian— stands an enormous billboard depicting the late great Bob Marley, fist held high, surrounded by 54 flags of the continent, emblazoned with a deceptively simple command: “Africa Unite.”

On February 6, 2005, some 300,000 people gathered in Addis Ababa’s Meskel Square for a free concert in honor of what would have been Bob Marley’s 60th birthday. The show capped a month-long symposium of panel discussions, youth workshops, and fund-raisers conceived as part of an ongoing effort to fulfill Marley’s Pan-African vision, the unification of all African nations.

“Africa had many great kings,” explains Bob’s eldest son David “Ziggy” Marley. “But most of our kingdom and our monarchy and everything was wiped out by colonialism. If Africa can unite resources—you have oil, I have diamonds—if we can pool together like a family would, we have a better chance of surviving.” That’s a mighty tall order, but Ziggy has no fear of trying what others consider impossible. It’s the way he was raised. “People arepeople,” as his grandmother Cedella Booker says, “but this is family.” And in the 25 years since Mrs. Booker’s son Bob passed away, his family has learned how hard it can be to live out the legend.

Right up until the Marley family’s private jet landed at Addis Ababa International Airport in late January, there were doubts about whether the whole symposium would really happen. After several lineup changes and the last-minute pullout of a major sponsor, Bob and Rita’s first-born child, Cedella, took the lead and covered much of the approximately $1 million-plus cost of the event herself. She says her dad came to her in a dream and told her the family had important work to do in Ethiopia. “When we got here, they told me they could build a clinic for $10,000,” she said. “I was like, How many do you want?”

The crowd at the concert was a spectacle to behold and extremely well behaved. But evidently, the Tuff Gong’s sound has lost none of its power to unnerve the cops. “One good thing about music,” he once sang, “when it hits you feel no pain.” But the same could not be said of the Ethiopian security forces. For song after song, police in blue and gray camouflage absentmindedly swung their truncheons, clubbing the youths who stood along the metal barricades straining to catch a glimpse of Marley magic.

It’s not easy to stage a massive outdoor concert in one of the world’s poorest countries, which may be why benefit shows like Live 8 prefer to transmit love to Africa largely via satellite. Still, there was nowhere else launch this event but the Rastafarian promised land. The very word Ethiopia is uttered in reggae songs like a magic spell. When Bob Marley sang, “Almighty God is a living man, in Get Up Stand Up, he was thinking of His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I, Emperor of Ethiopia, a devout Christian whom the Rasta faithful regarded as a living God. Even after Selassie was deposed and arrested during a 1974 coup—and reported dead the following year—Marley’s faith remained unshaken. “Jah Live” he would sing defiantly, and millions sang along. Today, Bob Marley is the one who has mystically defied the grave. “Bob Marley no dead yunno,”says the popular young Jamaican singer Gyptian, deadly serious. “Then how you turn on the radio this morning and hear Redemption Song? Ah no dead man sing that. Yeah. So Bob Marley will always live.”

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