BOB MARLEY: I AM AFRICAN

Pan-Africanist musical icon Bob Marley was born on this day, 6 February, in 1945 on a farm in Saint Ann Parish, Jamaica. Sources say he was named Nesta Robert Marley at birth, but that he changed his name to Robert Nesta Marley. However, he was best known as Bob Marley and is widely considered the father of reggae music for popularising it worldwide.

However, some may not know that Marley was a revolutionary who always identified as African first despite his Jamaican heritage. Neither did the legendary musician fail to include the African struggle for emancipation in his work with songs like ‘Africa Unite’ (1979), ‘Zimbabwe’ (1979), and ‘Buffalo Soldier’ (1978), among many others.

Just a year before his death, during a 1980 US interview, trailblazing Black journalist Gil Noble (1932-2012) asked whether he identified more as a Jamaican or African, to which Marley offered a succinct two-fold answer, as seen in this clip.

Marley always connected the dots between Africans on the continent and Africans abroad. The reductive white supremacist narratives about our motherland never made him shy away from proudly claiming his roots, something we could all learn from.

Video credit: ‘Like It Is,’ @ABC7NY (X)