Bob Marley’s Fight for Political Change in Jamaica

It was a remarkable event. It was held in the largest venue of its kind, the National Stadium in Kingston. Nearly thirty-five thousand people were there. All of the leading reggae singers were there. And all of the gang members and gang leaders were there, and there was peace between them that evening.

It had this sort of atmosphere that you sense in moments of potential change, in which the impossible seems possible. It was almost like a revolutionary moment.

The two most outstanding personalities among the Jamaican pantheon of reggae singers were Bob Marley and Peter Tosh. The latter had also been one of the Wailers, the three original members being Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, and Bunny Wailer.

What was interesting is that Peter Tosh’s presentation, which lasted for an hour that night, essentially didn’t support the peace initiative. His attitude was captured in his famous 1977 song ‘Equal Rights’, in which he sang, ‘I don’t want no peace, I want equal rights and justice.’ Tosh’s slogan ran against the grain of the event, which was more celebratory.

So Peter Tosh held one position, and Marley held another. Great artists performed all through the night, but Marley’s performance was the high point of event. He performed just around midnight. And, as you can see in the photograph, he called Manley and Seaga onstage, and he brought their hands together – quite different from Peter Tosh’s attitude that night.

But it’s complicated. On the one hand, yes, Marley is calling for the violence to end. But if you listened to the music Marley played that night, it was music directed against Jamaica remaining within the bounds of its neocolonial past. It’s almost as if Marley is saying with this gesture that Manley and Seaga have got to find a way to end the hostility so that we can actually change the country, which was the spirit in which Manley was elected.

Of course, Marley sings about one love, but it’s not one love in the abstract. It’s one love coming together to make a change, and it’s not divorced from the idea of fundamental structural transformation in Jamaica. Marley’s position is that ending the violence will allow a politics of social and political change to proceed.

Afterward, there was an interesting debate in the newspapers, initiated by an article in the radical newspaper of a small Marxist-Leninist party called the Workers Party of Jamaica, a newspaper called Struggle. That article essentially said that Peter won the night. Bob didn’t like it one little bit, and he was up at the offices of the newspaper the next day, cursing, saying basically, ‘You’re making out Peter as a revolutionary, and I am what?’

So there was a side debate going on about whether Bob had sold out by doing this, whereas my reading of Bob at that moment is that he was thinking, ‘If only working people can have peace, then we can begin to change this country.’