Night Beat Post 168 - Bob Marley Part III: “The attitude they gave off was like real rebels”

The name of the living God who came to Jamaica was Haile Selassie, the Emperor of Ethiopia, and the product of yet another complicated strand of history that marked the lives of Marley and Jamaica. Selassie’s importance for Jamaicans began in the life of another man, Marcus Garvey – an early 20^th century activist who encouraged Blacks to look to their African heritage and create their own destinies apart from the ones imposed on them by America and Jamaica. According to a persistent myth, Garvey instructed his followers in 1927 to look to Africa for the crowning of a Black king as a sign that a messiah was at hand. In point of fact, Garvey never uttered such a prophecy, but the claim remains attributed to him to this day. In 1930, when a young man named Ras Tafari maneuvered his way onto the throne of Ethiopia and became its first Black king in modern memory, the prophecy that Garvey never proclaimed took on the power of the word made flesh for many. Haile Selassie was the living God,…