Bob Marley: The Untold Story

A policy of destabilisation began that turned Jamaica into a battleground, especially after Manley was returned to power in December 1976 in the subsequent election. Soon the country was almost bankrupt. Bob Marley played a part in attempting to restore peace, forcing Manley and his opposition rival, Edward Seaga, to shake hands publicly at the 1978 One Love Peace Concert in Kingston, and bringing opposing gunmen together. But the 1980 election, won by Edward Seaga, in power until 1989, was the bloodiest of them all.

In recent years, a measure of peace seems to have been brought to the island. A positive relationship with the nearby United States has been forged, and there is a previously unsurpassed national pride, following the Jamaican soccer team’s qualification for the 1998 World Cup and an unprecedented run of successes at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Still, the story of Jamaica is that of an island that can be simultaneously heaven and hell – as indeed described in the Bob Marley song ‘Time Will Tell’, in its line ‘Think you’re in heaven but you’re living in hell’; a country that could suffer the devastating economic bullying of the United States’ Caribbean Basin Initiative during the 1970s but that now, against expectations, is experiencing economic growth and a resultant rise in self-esteem that lets it serve as a model for developing nations in the first years of the twenty-first century. And at least its inhabitants rarely forget that Jamaica is a land whose blessings are surely God-given.

Bob Marley is seen by the world as the personification of the rebellious island nation of Jamaica – not without considerable justification. For Bob Marley was a hero figure, in the classic mythological sense. From immensely humble beginnings, with his talent and religious belief his only weapons, the Jamaican recording artist applied himself with unstinting perseverance to spreading his prophetic musical message; he only departed this planet when he felt his vision of One World, One Love, which was inspired by his belief in Rastafarianism, was beginning in some quarters to be heard and felt. For example, in 1980, the European tour of Bob Marley and the Wailers played to the largest audiences a musical act had ever experienced there. And as much as the late Bob Marley continues to personify Jamaica, so he also embodied the soul of what the world knows as the odd, apparently paradoxical religion of Rastafari, the only faith uncritically accepted globally as an integral aspect of popular music.

Bob Marley’s story is that of an archetype, which is why it continues to have such a powerful and ever-growing resonance: it embodies, among other themes, political repression, metaphysical and artistic insights, gangland warfare, and various periods in a mystical wilderness. It is no surprise that Bob Marley now enjoys an icon-like status more akin to that of the rebel myth of Che Guevara than to that of a pop star. And his audience continues to widen: to westerners, Bob’s apocalyptic truths prove inspirational and life-changing; in the Third World, his impact is similar, except that it goes further. Not just amongst Jamaicans, but also amongst the Hopi people of New Mexico and the Maoris of New Zealand, in Indonesia, in India, even – especially – in those parts of West Africa from which slaves were plucked and taken to the New World, Bob Marley is seen as the Redeemer figure returning to lead this planet out of confusion. Some will come out and say it directly: that Bob Marley is the reincarnation of Jesus Christ long awaited by much of the world. In such an interpretation of his life, the cancer that killed Bob Marley is inevitably described as a modern version of the crucifixion.

Although the disease probably did have its origins in assorted injuries to his right foot, conspiracy theories still persist. Was Bob’s body poisoned still further when going for medical check-ups in Babylonian cities, such as London, Miami, and New York? Were his hotel rooms or homes bombarded with cancer-inducing rays? Or, more simply, was Bob’s system slowly poisoned by the lead from the bullet that remained in his body after the 1976 attempt on his life? (All of these were suggested to me by his mother as possible causes of her son’s death.)

Prior to the US leg of the Uprising tour in the autumn of 1980, Bob Marley had been given a complete physical examination, allegedly passing with flying colours – though this is odd, as the musician was certainly in the latter stages of suffering from cancer. In Miami, before the tour kicked off, he played a game of football for America Jamaica United, against a team of Haitians, in which his fluid skills seemed unabated.

But yes, you think, the cancer probably was the consequence of the injuries to his foot. And then you remember that this was a time when the forces of darkness thought nothing of killing a woman such as Karen Silkwood, who was endeavouring to expose a nuclear risk. How much more must they have been threatened by a charismatic, alternative world leader who in widely accessible popular art was delivering warnings about the wickedness of the world’s institutions?

Thanks to the tireless efforts of Timothy White, the author of Catch a Fire, the wonderful Bob Marley biography published in 1984, the extent of the CIA files on Bob has become widely known. Chris Blackwell, who signed Bob to his Island Records label, had personal experience of this. ‘There are conspiracy theories with everything, especially out of Jamaica, because Jamaicans have such fertile imaginations. The only thing I will say is that I was brought in by the American ambassador in Jamaica to his office, and he said that they were keeping an eye on me, on what I was doing, because I was working with this guy who was capable of de-stabilising. They had their eye on him.’

Bob’s end was very sad. After his collapse whilst jogging in New York’s Central Park on 8 October 1980, he received radiation treatment at the city’s Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center; his locks fell out, like a portent.

Even confronted by a future of such grim uncertainty, Bob Marley managed never to lose his wry view of life. Two weeks after his collapse, his death was being reported in the US media; he put out a statement in which his characteristic dry sense of humour was clearly still in evidence: ‘They say that living in Manhattan is hell, but …’

With a similar attitude, he strove to make light of his illness to his children. Whilst he was being treated in New York, they flew up from Jamaica to see him at the Essex House hotel on Central Park South, where he habitually stayed when in Manhattan. ‘He told us what was wrong with him,’ said Cedella. ‘His hair was gone. We were like, “Where’s your hair?” He was making it to be such a big joke: “Oh, I’m Frankenstein.” We said, “That’s not funny.”

‘I knew Daddy had a bad toe, because I would have to clean it sometimes. But I just thought it was a bad toe. I didn’t expect anything else but for maybe the nail to come off.’

By November 1980, the doctors at the Sloan-Kettering admitted they could do no more. A number of alternative cures were considered: the apricot kernel therapy attempted by the actor Steve McQueen; a spiritual cure by journeying to Ethiopia; a simple return home to Jamaica – though this plan was abandoned when the island was seen to be in the grip of the most violent general election it had ever known.

After the options had been weighed up, Bob travelled to Bavaria in West Germany, to the Sunshine House Cancer Clinic in Bad Wiessee. A holistic centre, it was run by the controversial Dr Josef Issels, a former SS officer. Issels only took on cases that had been proclaimed incurable, and he claimed a 20 per cent success rate.

The environment, however, was hostile and alien. The house of the dread who would never tour Babylon during the winter months was surrounded by thick snow. Bob would go to Issels’s clinic for two hours of treatment each day then return to spend time with the several visitors who flew in to be with him – his mother, his wife, members of the Wailers, old friends. Much of his time was spent watching videotapes of soccer matches, particularly those played by the Brazilian team.

But Bob never stopped songwriting. He seemed to think he could make it. His weight went up and for a time he seemed in better spirits. But the sterile, picture-postcard atmosphere of Bad Wiessee hardly nurtured Bob’s soul. ‘It was a horrible place,’ thought Chris Blackwell. ‘It must have been very disorientating for him. He had virtually no hair, just scraggly bits, and was so thin: he must have weighed a hundred pounds or something like that. He looked terrible. But there was something … He was still so proud. He chatted for a bit. He was very strong somehow still.’

The atmosphere where he was staying was even worse: vicious psychological warfare was taking place between, as Mortimer Planner, the Rastafarian elder, described it, ‘the Orthodox and Twelve Tribes factions’. It seems demeaning to everyone involved, including Bob, to describe this in further detail. Sufficient to heed Planner’s words: ‘A terrible misunderstanding has gone on. For all these people loved Bob.’

He developed a craving for plantain tarts, and it was arranged for a carton of them to be flown to him from Jamaica. Before they arrived, he decided he wanted to go home. He had had enough of Bad Wiessee. He knew what was going to happen. Bob Marley asked Chris Blackwell to rent him a plane. Blackwell said he would send one for him immediately. ‘But even then, Bob hadn’t lost his sense of humour,’ smiled the Island Records boss. ‘Bob always thought I was kinda cheap, so he said, “Don’t send me one with propellers now.”’

Accompanied by two doctors, Bob was flown across the Atlantic. He made it no further than Miami.

Judy Mowatt, one of the I-Threes, was at home on the morning of 11 May 1981. A little after 11.30 she heard a loud clap of thunder and saw lightning fork through a window of her house and flash on a picture of Bob on the wall. And Judy knew exactly what this foretold.

At a little after 11.30 a.m., in the Cedars of Lebanon hospital in Miami, Bob surrendered his soul to the Almighty Jah.

NATURAL MYSTIC

Although in later life the name of Bob Marley came to be considered as synonymous with Kingston’s downtown ghetto of Trench Town, the singer was really a country boy, raised and reared in a backwoods part of Jamaica. There he would watch the ebb and flow of nature, observing animals and plants grow, paying especial attention to the timeless progress of trees; in his music there is often a sense of an association with the earth itself.

The ‘garden parish’ of St Ann in which he ‘came up’, as Jamaicans would say, is often considered the most beautiful part of Jamaica. And Nine Miles, where Nesta Robert Marley was born, is like a perfect microcosm of the north-central region of Jamaica in which it is located. Deep in the interior of the extraordinary lush landscape of St Ann, and not easily accessible, the rolling, feminine countryside around the hamlet of Nine Miles is like the heart, even the soul and mystery of the island. Located at 3,500 feet above sea-level, its height gives this landlocked region distinct climatic advantages: for example, it enjoys temperate weather, cooler and less oppressive than that of the marshy plains in the south of the island or the baking, concrete swelter of Kingston, the capital.

Cedella Malcolm, the mother of Bob Marley, was born on 23 July 1926; she shared the date, but not the year of birth, with a man whose very name ultimately would weave a life-changing spell over her: Ras Tafari, Emperor Haile Selassie I, Negus Negusti, King of Kings, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah. Such an apparent coincidence should be no great surprise: the very air of Jamaica seems thick with great truths and inconceivable, magical mysteries. Obeah, an African diasporic word, a marriage of African animist and Catholic practices, had long been accepted by many as a norm. And in Jamaica – as in neighbouring Cuba and Haiti, where it is known as voodoo – it lived hand in hand with what often revealed itself to be a stringent, unforgiving form of Christianity.

This was the world in which Bob Marley’s mother grew up. It was not surprising then that when Cedella Malcolm – whose name was familiarly shortened to ‘Ciddy’ – was eight years old, she saw Hubert Hall, a local practitioner of obeah, confess that he had caused the crash which had overturned her father’s car when she was a toddler. On his deathbed the man struggled to save his soul by admitting the wickedness of his sins and transgressions. Lying on a board in Cedella’s father’s kitchen at Nine Miles, Hall’s head seemed to dwarf his drawn, wretchedly suffering body: it was pure skin and bone, except for his feet, which had swollen up to almost the size of his skull. As he spoke, Cedella could see the fear and terror emanating in a kind of steam from his jaw, his lips skinning back from his teeth.

Driven by a bitterness and jealousy that gnawed away at him like a cancer, Hall had waited until Omeriah Malcolm’s De Soto, a symbol of the family’s prosperity, on that day piled up with relatives, purred along one of the only straight stretches on the endlessly winding, ever climbing road that clambers up through Nine Miles. As her father approached Eleven Miles, Hall summoned up his ‘science’, as obeah is also known, to flip the car over on its side. A truckdriver passing through Nine Miles called out the grim news: Mr Malcolm’s car overturn ’pon de bank and all de people dem dead dere!

Omeriah’s friends and relatives, the tiny Cedella clutched to the bosom of an aunt, hurried to the scene of the accident. Arriving there, they experienced a measure of relief; no one was dead, but there were some terrible injuries: the mother of one of Cedella’s brothers – as befitted a man prosperous and powerful enough to be the local custos (a legally ordained arbitrator), her father had not restricted his love life to Cedella’s mother, his wife Alberta, and he had over twenty children by various women – had had her hair burned off entirely by scalding water from the cracked radiator. Trapped in the wreckage, crumpled and crammed up on top of each other, were the other passengers, dreadfully burnt, or moaning from the pain of their broken bones and torn flesh. Sitting dazed by the side of the road, however, with only a slight cut to his face, was Cedella’s father, balancing her little brother John on his knee: his inborn goodness had led God to protect Omeriah Malcolm.

Even as they were taking Hubert Hall’s body on a stretcher up to the burial plot, little Ciddy was still mulling over the man’s confession, her first direct experience of the force of obeah; the casualness of his wickedness caused her deep distress. Hall admitted he had been in league with others who had sought out his dark talent, urging him on to this terrible act with no more lavish a bribe than a meal of goat’s head, yam, and cho-cho. But for most of the adults who had heard Hall’s tormented words, such wickedness unfortunately was commonplace. Her father, for example, had little doubt of their veracity; and of the way the obeahman had distorted the ‘natural mystic’ that wafts on the breeze through Nine Miles like one of God’s greatest and most secret truths.

The Malcolms were the oldest, most respected family in the region of Rhoden Hall, where Nine Miles is located, owning or renting a considerable amount of land and local properties. As the ownership of the luxury De Soto motor car indicated, they were by no means impoverished. Although there was no electricity or running water in Nine Miles, Ciddy’s father owned one of the only Delco generators in the area. Omeriah Malcolm would start it up on Sundays, so that his friends and relatives could listen to his radio. For this enjoyment they would walk from miles around. ‘Sometimes we would hear a sermon from Kingston, sometimes rumba music from Cuba,’ said Ciddy.

Omeriah’s father was Robert ‘Uncle Day’ Malcolm, who was descended from the Cromanty slaves shipped from the Gold Coast – what is now Ghana – between 200 and 250 years previously: as tenant slaves, the Malcolms had lived in this bush region long before slavery was abolished in 1838.

Cedella’s grandmother, Katherine Malcolm, known as Yaya, lived ‘down the bottom’, away from the road over on the other side of a steep hill. Her home was the family residence known as ‘Big House’, though it consisted only of one room and a hall – but there were a number of outhouses. Cedella had the impression that Yaya never slept. Every morning, round about 3 or 4 a.m., the hour at which many Jamaican countryfolk rise, Mr Malcolm would walk up the goat-path to his mother’s for his morning coffee. He would take with him – as would anyone who ventured up that way – a big log of wood to stoke up the fire that always blazed at Yaya’s; in those days before matches became plentiful, anyone who needed fire would go up to see her and beg a blazing lump of wood. When Cedella’s father returned home after an hour or so, he’d carry with him a covered quart tin full of coffee for the children’s breakfast. Set up for the day, Omeriah would then leave for his various pieces of farmland. He was the biggest cultivator of coffee in the neighbourhood, taking it to market at Green Hill in his horse and cart before he bought first a Ford Model T and then the De Soto. But he would also grow pimento and bananas, making sure that every piece of land he worked had a plentiful supply of banana trees.

But Omeriah Malcolm’s relative commercial success was not his only source of wealth. His father had carefully instructed him in the arcane arts brought to Jamaica by the Cromanty slaves. Omeriah proved to have an empathy and skill with these God-given positive forces; he was, to all intents and purposes, a magician, but one who dealt only with light and high matters; one of his closest friends was an eminent Jamaican ‘scientist’ so skilled he was said to be able simultaneously to write two letters of the alphabet with one hand. Omeriah Malcolm became what was known as a ‘myalman’, a healer and a bush doctor, and his understanding included the natural medicine and power in the individual plants, such as Tree of Life and Sink-a-Bible, which flourish in Jamaica. When she grew older, Cedella’s father would confide in her about the many powerful spirits lodged in the neighbourhood of Nine Miles. It had always been so, he would say, and would puzzle why so many people there were ready to surrender themselves to the dark forces; why it would always be said that the place was a small garden but a bitter weed.

Ten years later, when Cedella Malcolm was pregnant with her son Nesta, her father or her grandmother would show her which herbs to take to ease any potential problems in the pregnancy; which blend of bush tea would ease high blood pressure or back-ache; which bush was the best cleanser for the coming baby’s skin. Her father, in fact, was more nervous about this imminent birth than his daughter. Ciddy loved being pregnant, her already intriguing aura, one of a kind of infinite calm, heightened even further by a numinous glow as she felt the child growing within her. But her father would scold her. ‘You runnin’ around hearty, but you sicker than the rest of your sisters,’ he would admonish. ‘Take up your doctor book and read it instead of laughing and playing. Always remember,’ he would add a piece of Jamaican folk wisdom about pregnancy, never failing to unnerve his daughter, ‘you are between life and death until you give birth to that baby.’

‘I was young. I didn’t know any better. I was happy, everything was lovely. The pregnancy was great. Everything was nice.’ Sometimes the unborn child would give a clue to one of the career options he would later consider: ‘This baby kick like hell – like a footballer.’ Cedella would even find it within her to be able to ignore those malicious souls in the neighbourhood who would audibly curse her as she passed, angry at her for having taken up with a white man.

For, two years previously, one Captain Norval Marley, a white Jamaican (although there are recent suggestions that, as with many ‘white’ Jamaicans, his blood bore more than a trace of a black lineage), had proudly ridden on his horse into Nine Miles. The man was employed by the colonial government: he was involved in yet another attempt by the authorities to persuade locals to farm or even settle in Jamaica’s vast acres of uncultivated bush, the region around Nine Miles being this man Marley’s particular terrain. At first he boarded in Yaya’s Big House. Then one day he asked Omeriah if he could oversee the building of a small house for him to stay in: Omeriah complied, knocking up a wooden shack in a weekend. Marley was something of a ne’er-do-well, referred to by almost all those who knew him as ‘the Captain’ – even though it seemed there was scant justification for him to have been given such a rank. (It may have originated in a spell in the Nigerian police force after the First World War.)

It was in this tiny wooden house that Captain Marley, already in his sixties, began an affair with the foolish girl, then only seventeen: he would make little jokes with her about how their destinies were linked because of the way their surnames both began with the letters ‘MA’. The relationship had a consequence that could be seen as virtually inevitable: Cedella was married to Captain Marley on a Friday in June 1944, not long after they had both learned of the pregnancy; the next day he left Nine Miles for Kingston, having bestowed legitimacy on his unborn child. Cedella was surprised, but protected by her youthful innocence from grief. Norval Marley had explained, after all, that he was becoming ill and needed to have an operation; his long days in the saddle had caused a hernia to develop. This was behind his move back to Kingston: for the sake of his health he was taking another, more humble job, as an overseer on the bridges being built to carry water into Kingston.

The pregnancy was problem-free. On the first Sunday of February 1945, Cedella Marley, as her marriage had caused her to be renamed, went as usual to church. The next day she hoped to fast, rejoice and give testimony in the church in the evening, as Elder Thomas encouraged his flock to do each Monday. But Cedella felt the first twinges of going into labour and remained at the property of her father, a vacant shop with two rooms attached, in which she had set up her bedroom. The next morning, Auntie Missus, as they called the great-aunt who doubled as local midwife, was called to Ciddy, who was starting to experience pain of a new and fearsome degree. Auntie Missus pointed at pictures of pretty women from magazines which Cedella had pasted up on her bedroom wall. ‘All these women go through the same thing,’ she reminded her. Auntie Missus had brought food – some yam, some sweet potato, some rice; by now the contractions were coming more powerfully, and Ciddy had to time each mouthful in between them.

The baby boy was born at around 2.30 on the Wednesday morning of 6 February 1945. He weighed 7 pounds 4 ounces; the afterbirth was taken and buried at the foot of one of Omeriah’s coconut trees. The child was called Nesta Robert Marley. All three names came from the father. ‘Robert’ was in tribute to Norval’s elder brother, a prominent cricket and tennis player. ‘Nesta’ was also suggested by Norval Marley: Ciddy had never heard the name before and she was concerned that people might mishear it as ‘Lester’. She didn’t know what it meant but in time she would discover it was ‘messenger’. The child had been conceived in Yaya’s Big House, and after the birth Cedella returned there to live with him.

Nesta was a healthy child. Running on the rock stone, him ‘not have no time fe sick’; brought up on a country diet of fresh vegetables and fruit, the only inkling of a prickly digestion was the vomiting that would occur whenever he ate eggs. As the baby started to grow bigger, Cedella would from time to time feel a twinge of loneliness or sadness that she didn’t hear more regularly from his father. Some help, some support, would have been nice, that was all. Even when he sent money – for a time four or five pounds would come most months, though it was by no means guaranteed – the envelope with the cash would be addressed to her father. As time went on, moreover, the money supply began to dwindle until Cedella hardly heard from her husband.