A “Second Emancipation” Transfigured?
Reflections on Bob Marley at 60

"We must create a second emancipation–an emancipation of our minds.”

Marcus Garvey, 1929 anniversary of Emancipation in the English speaking Caribbean1

"Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery/ none but ourselves can free our minds.”

Bob Marley, “Redemption Songs,” 1980

Even most Jamaicans seem surprised to learn that Bob Marley’s line about “mental slavery” was adapted from Marcus Garvey’s call for a “second emancipation.” For the occasion of Marley’s 60th earthday, I’ve been meditating on what mental slavery and emancipation meant to Garvey, and to Marley, and means to the global audience that has made Marley a prophet of “One Love” (or a “real revolutionary”), and to the contemporary Jamaica embroiled in contentious debates about race and gender/sexuality.

I am convinced that the notion of a “second emancipation” from mental slavery is one of the great ideas in human history. When I look around for comparisons, I inevitably wind up with a scriptural frame of reference, such as Paul’s admonition: “ Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by the yoke of slavery.” (Galatians 5:1) Yet the specific linking of a second, mental emancipation to a prior, incomplete emancipation from physical slavery—this seems to have a uniquely Jamaican genealogy.

In a 1978 talk about Jamaica’s post-1948 “Cultural Revolution,” Victor Stafford Reid observed that after getting rid of the physical bondage of slavery, "the iron had not changed. It had merely entered our souls.”2 We find Marley calling for emancipation from mental slavery in 1980, just as Jamaica was abandoning its period of socialist revolution. And in the 1990s, Jamaican literary critic Carolyn Cooper observed: “The problem with emancipation is the fact that the chains on the mind are often even more binding than the chains on the body.”3

The suggestion that liberation from mental shackles is a process that must be re-imagined and re-enacted: that is an idea for the ages. Especially our own cynical, violent world. Our capacity to imagine meaningful resistance has shriveled, at the very moment when resistance is most needed. And so it is good to have Brother Bob’s voice still ringing in our ears, reminding us of the stakes beyond the struggles of our daily lives:

"I and I no come to fight flesh and blood

But spiritual wickedness in high and low places.”

In the high places:

"See them fighting for power

For they know not the hour.”

In the low places:

"Well what we know

Is just what they teach us

And we’re so ignorant

That every time they can reach us.”4

 I’ve been writing about Bob Marley, the Rastas, and Jamaican music for many years now, in forums ranging from the Los Angeles Times to Cambridge University Press to European and American websites.5 But living in Garvey and Marley’s homeland exerts pressure on how I speak about the forms of emancipation that both men advocated, embodied, and inspired. I feel an urge towards self-censorship at the moment when private thoughts are translated into public words. When culture heroes are transformed into quasi-messiahs, it becomes near-impossible to translate their truths to our day, especially among those who are most invested in hero worship.

The pressure I feel on my mind and tongue tells me that the best way I can pay tribute to Bob at 60 is to speak from the heart. To acknowledge freely that I can only provide one personal perspective, which is that of an outsider, which carries its own strengths and limitations.

I would not be in Jamaica today if it were not for Bob Marley and Marcus Garvey. My first trip to Jamaica, for Sunsplash in 1987, coincided with Garvey’s 100th anniversary, and a lot of righteous dreads came down to the dance. I got ahold of a Garvey T-shirt. People expressed their delight that a foreigner would wear the iconic image of their national hero.6

I had already been involved with Jamaican music prior to 1987, as a songwriter and journalist. But that visit had a tremendous influence on me. All these years I’ve maintained a relationship, at some distance, with Jamaicans and their cultural expressions. As I developed a dialogue with an international audience through radio shows, writing, and public speaking, I was often forced to re-define my own presence in Rasta-inspired culture, or more broadly, Africana cultures. The world of “reggae music” was defined as a “black” domain, despite its primarily non-Africana audience. Within that domain, there was and is an unresolved tensions between “black liberation” and “multiracial redemption.” There were those who saw the two as deeply inter-related, neither possible without the other. And there were many others who believed that “black liberation” could only be enacted by opposition to all things “white” or European.

In my book On Racial Frontiers I wrote a section on Garvey as a forerunner to Marley and the Rastas. I found that, in contrast to other “racial equality” movements such as the Frederick Douglass wing of abolitionism, or the African National Congress in South Africa, both of which aspired to non-racial democracy, Garvey’s vision of a “Racial Empire” involved collaboration with the Ku Klux Klan. Garvey, like the Klan, wanted complete racial separation. Like the Klan, he hated mulattoes, as evidence of “amalgamation” or racial impurity. This was quite an irony, considering that it was the biracial Bob Marley who became the best-known international spokesman for Garvey’s “Africa for the Africans” philosophy.

As I went on a book tour, I saw how easily a less than adulatory reference to Garvey could trigger hostile responses that shut down all possible discussion. This was manifest in Jamaica at the screening of the PBS documentary “Marcus Garvey: Reap the Whirlwind.”7 A friend here told me how Robert Hill, a Garvey scholar who had served as a consultant for the documentary, had broken down and cried the day after he was vilified at this screening.

Then there is the thorny issue of Bob’s Anglo father. Reactions I’ve encountered range from surprise (in the U.S.) at discovering this, to resentment that I would make an issue of a “black culture hero’s” mixed ancestry, to contempt or condescension towards Bob himself. As a youth Bob was often “styled a white man” and suffered tremendously because of this. Yet many youths today in Jamaica dismiss Marley by saying “he only made it because he’s half white.”

What Bob had to say on these matters ought to be a fundamental challenge to black vs. white racial binaries. We find Bob declaring that he was "neither on the black man’s side, nor the white man’s side, but on God’s side.” He insisted that Asians and Europeans could also be Rastas. He declared that “Unity is the world’s key, and racial harmony. Until the white man stops calling himself white and the black man stops calling himself black, we will not see it.”8 Marley defined himself primarily as a Rasta, not a black man, although he of course was a Pan-Africanist, and a proponent of black pride, within the larger definition of Rasta. Rasta was an African-centered, but at root a non-racial consciousness.

Then there is the question of the psychological influence of Marley’s absentee “white” father, given the way in which Marley imagined Selassie as both black and yet non-racial. In On Racial Frontiers I suggested that there was a link between Bob’s racial "ambiguity," and his imagining Selassie as a "perfect father." In an interview in Rebel Music, Jamaican scholar Garth White confirmed this point. White says explicitly that "Selassie became a father figure for Bob in a personal sense…Bob felt a personal affinity for Selassie based on rejection by his father."

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