Melville Cooke, Contributor
Come on and smile, You're in Jamaica now
Bob Marley
THE NOTION of Bob Marley being made a National Hero has resurfaced, this time, as reported in The Sunday Gleaner, along with a campaign for his February 6th birthday to be made a national holiday.
The story quoted an Associated Press report in which Jacqueline Knight-Campbell who is organising the campaign for the Bob Marley Foundation said: "Anywhere you go in the world the first thing people think of when they hear Jamaica is Bob Marley."
Now that is all well and good for the Jamaica Tourist Board and the all-exclusive hotel owners, but being Jamaica's poster Rastaman does not a National Hero make.
In fact, if that was the criterion, I can think of another similarly coiffed but professionally far removed set of gentlemen who haunt the beaches and reggae festival, for whom a single and singular part of the anatomy being so enshrined would be more appropriate. Then we could create the Order of National Foot.
CRITERIA
A National Hero, by my criteria, is someone who either pursues a genuine nationalistic agenda purposefully or, in pursuing an agenda for one sector of the society enlarges, as Martin Luther King Jnr. would say, the rights of all. Marley is an excellent songwriter (and average singer, blessed with as expressive a voice as you will find), but his agenda was far from Jamaican. In fact, he did not consider himself a Jamaican, despite writing Smile Jamaica at the request of Michael Manley, and it would therefore be inane to make him a national hero.
A much more fitting heroic honour, if you will, for Marley is Pan-African Hero, for his articulation of Africa's concerns and vision on the Survival album in particular, among his albums for Island Records. And there is no way Peter Tosh could be left out.
Jamaica does not need another hero or national holiday, for that matter. We already have Emancipation Day (good), Independence Day (a farce, since we are not independent), National Heroes Day (so-so; most of our heroes are not), Christmas Day (total fraud), Boxing Day (ditto, as it is attached to C Day), New Years Day (decent), Good Friday (same as C Day) and Easter Monday (you know what I am going to say, right?). Added to that is Valentines Day, which is a holiday in all but name. We do not only not need another hero; we can also cull the set that we have. George William Gordon was hardly a factor in the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865, for which he got his neck stretched. Sam Sharpe was the most unfortunate hero; he ordered a sit in, peaceful strike and the Blacks burnt the canefields. Hanging Sharpe was like jailing Martin Luther King for the August 11 and 12, 1965 Watts Riots in California, or the Summer Riots of 1967.
Alexander Bustamante and Norman Manley are architects of a system that has created tribes in Jamaica where none existed before. There is nothing heroic about one family pitting the poor against each other now, is there? As for leading Jamaica to Independence there is nothing great about that. We were used and discarded without a pittance.
Nanny of the Maroons was heroic to the Maroons, but not to the rest of Jamaicans. Marcus Garvey and Paul Bogle are the genuine articles.
There is a Bob who should be a National Hero Robert Lightbourne, who had the blueprint for Jamaican scientific self-reliance, from food preservation to manufacturing, that is given much lip service these days. He also wrote the music for the National Anthem, which I rather like, as opposed to Hugh Sherlock's words, more so the first than the second verse. Leonard Howell, who founded the Rastafarian movement at Pinnacle in Sligoville, is very much a hero of spiritual proportions as well.
And what about symbolic National Heroes of the people who really built this country, much like various imperial nations honour the Unknown Soldier who conquered in civilisation's name, such as The Teacher, The Construction Worker, The Emergency Service Worker?
And, for me, there would be representations of the Rebellious Slave, as well as those two special persons in the anti-slavery movement the Canefield Burner and The Poisoner.
But Marley? Nah.
Mel Cooke is a freelance writer.
