LITMIR.BIZ

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as a religion of the dispossessed, there is an element of condescension in such an assessment of Jamaica’s early followers of Rastafarianism. Denied is the intellectual, even existential, acuity and rigour of so many practitioners of the religion: the depth of biblical and historical knowledge displayed at a Rastafarian reasoning is impressive, as is the mental agility to perceive every semantic subtlety of the arguments propagated. The myriad contradictions that litter Rastafari assume the status of numinous truths when one recalls Carl Jung’s assertion that ‘all great truths must end in paradox.’

      In the hills of eastern Jamaica, in the parish of St Thomas, which is traditionally associated with such mystical – and specifically Jamaican – strands of Christianity as kumina, pocomania, and revivalism, Rastafarian encampments sprang up; here a life of ascetism and artistry became the armour of the religion’s followers against Babylon. To the west, Leonard Howell, one of the island’s chief propagators of the religion, also known as ‘the Gong’, founded the Pinnacle encampment in an abandoned hilltop estate between Kingston and Spanish Town, conveniently, when it came to growing plantations of marijuana, out of sight of the authorities. Eventually taking thirteen wives, Howell finally decided that it was not Haile Selassie who was Jah but himself. After his mountain eyrie was raided by police in 1954, he was thrown into a home for the mentally ill, and Pinnacle was closed down. The dreads from it spilled into the ghettoes of west Kingston. Shortly before and after independence in 1962, the violent incidents between Rastas and the police made headlines in the Daily Gleaner, but the number of His Majesty’s followers involved in such affairs was infinitesimal compared to the way the movement was burning its thoughts with the speed of a bush-fire into the popular psyche of Jamaica.

      But it took the unceasing efforts of one man, who had come up in Kingston hearing the stream-of-consciousness orations of dreads in Back-a-Wall and the Dungle, to popularise and make universally known the apparently crazy idea that the emperor of Ethiopia could be the living deity.

      That man, of course, was Bob Marley, who came to be seen as the personification of Rastafari. Without Bob Marley most of the world would never have learned of Jah Rastafari, or entered into any debate whatsoever about the possible divinity of Haile Selassie. In Jamaica, the image of His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I, King of Kings, Conquering Lion of Judah is inescapable, accompanied as it invariably is by a soundtrack of the addictive hymns of praise to His divinity that make up most of the material of roots and conscious reggae – a music whose father, to all intents and purposes, was the fatherless Bob Marley, a man who never wrote an indifferent song and who united masses around the globe. Many of his brethren in the faith felt that this was the entire purpose of the blessing of the man’s talent. Many others, however, believed that Bob was capable of this task because of his spiritual closeness to His Majesty himself, on whose right-hand side he was more than adequately fitted to sit.

      As yet, young Nesta Marley knew almost nothing about the Rastas’ religion. He was simply getting through his schooldays, in a more perfunctory manner than perhaps his hardworking mother realised, anxious to get out into some form of adult life. However, his mother had moved him yet again: to St Aloysius Boys School, located at 74–6 Duke Street, on the corner of Sutton Street and Duke Street, run by Catholic sisters. Bob never really adapted to St Aloysius: ultimately, he would come to understand he had had almost no secondary education. With no permanent male role model to act as a guide, the transition from childhood to adolescence was even more awkward for him than for most teenagers. And in the evenings, his mother would not be around. On the corner of Beeston Street and Spanish Town Road, Cedella had started up a ‘cold-supper shop’, as they are known in Jamaica – curiously, as the food cold-supper shops offer is generally hot, fried, or cooked in a pot, sold next to the bottles of Red Stripe and rum that also characterise such institutions. Late one afternoon, whilst Cedella was working at her business, a rough-looking youth appeared in her shop. ‘Lady, you have a son named Nesta?’ he demanded. When Cedella asked why he wanted to know, the youth replied that Nesta had got a ‘chop over his eye’. Worried, she went to search for her son, but he ran off when she caught a glimpse of him down by his school. When he eventually came up to see his mother at her shop, Nesta had a Band-Aid plastered above his eye. One of his friends, he said, had thrown a stone and caught his face, an everyday cause of blindness in developing countries. Nesta had run off when he’d seen his mother by the school, he said, in case she might have called the police on his friend.

      There would be few more opportunities for such after-school pranks. When he was 15, Nesta came home one day from school carrying a large pile of textbooks. Cedella asked him why. The headteacher, he told his mother, had closed down the school and returned to live in the country. Although startled by the news, Cedella knew there was only one response: to get her son working, preferably at a trade. She was used to the sound of Nesta rehearsing music with his friends – specifically, Bunny Livingston and a friend from the neighbourhood, Desmond (Dekker) Dacre – but she had little faith that this would secure his future. By now, Cedella had bought a small restaurant, putting her sister Rose in charge of it. But one day Nesta came home and told his mother that the restaurant had been broken into and all its contents stolen. The boy and his mother decided to sleep the night in the premises in order that it be protected from further attacks, but left and went home after a friend pointed out that if the thieves returned they would almost certainly kill anyone they found there. Soon Cedella sold it to her brother John, who resolved the problem of night-time break-ins by turning the property into a twenty-four-hour business.

      For Cedella’s son there were too many unanswered questions, not the least those surrounding his parenthood. Why did he never see his father? Why had he been cursed with light skin, a clear indication of white blood flowing in his veins? It was a weapon for other youth when they wanted to taunt him for something. So much moving around from place to place, from home to home … As Nesta roamed Kingston, often playing truant, he would sometimes find himself in the area he spent time in during that year in the capital when he thought he had lost his mother for ever; and at those times he would feel an inexplicable chill run through him. Within him was a gnawing sense of unease, a fear of opening himself to others. He was no stranger to a feeling of tears of frustration and anger welling in his eyes. No wonder he veered between an appearance of shy timidity and that pure screwface mask that was the habitual shield of the ghetto youth. As he grew older, he often seemed to wear a permanent frown.

      In Jamaica in the late 1950s, there was an undercurrent that suggested everything was up for grabs. People were redefining themselves, working out who they were with a new confidence. The increasingly uncertain, guilty and repressive hold of the British colonialists was about to be shaken off. Already there were whispers of independence being granted to the island, as, in the wake of the Second World War, it had begun to be around the world. New times were coming.

      This sense of optimism was reflected in the music. Jamaicans had developed a taste for American R’n’B when US troops were based there during the Second World War. During the late 1940s, a number of big bands were formed – those of Eric Dean, who had employed both Don Drummond and Ernest Ranglin, and Val Bennett, for example. Jitterbugging audiences would dance until dawn to tunes they drew from American artists such as Count Basie, Duke Ellington, and Glenn Miller.

      By 1950, in the USA the big bands were being superseded by newer outfits: the feisty, optimistic new sounds of bop and rhythm and blues. In Jamaica, these new American popular-music forms were absorbed but in each case given a unique, local, stylistic twist.

      There had always been a large traffic of Jamaicans to the United States, a country ever eager – as the United Kingdom was – for fresh supplies of manual workers to undertake the jobs disdained by its more successful citizens. Ambitious, musically inclined Jamaicans would return from the USA with piles of the hottest, most underground 78s; to conceal the tunes’ identities, the labels would be scratched off before they were used by sound systems. Sound systems were like portable discos for giants: they would consist of up to thirty or forty speakers, each as large as wardrobes, joined by a vast, intricate pattern of cables that seemed an organic growth from Jamaica’s profusion of dangling liana vines. Music, which would sporadically and often eccentrically be commented on by the disc jockeys spinning the records, would thud out of them at a spine-shaking volume.

      The sound-system dances took over Jamaica. Few people

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