HE WAS ALIVE He was alive and she had fully anticipated, autograph book and all, that she was going to touch the hem of his garment, so to speak. And by the way, I have been reliably informed that the Hopi Indians have their annual celebration of Bob the Prophet, being able to prove through their oral tradition that he had been foretold and he is the one.
The second story happened backstage the Mother's Day Rally staged by Women Working for Transformation in Half-Way Tree. I was the stage manager. I really don't know anybody who enjoy stage-managing a show in Jamaica where there is a band and a couple microphones every man waan 'touch de mike' and dem nuh plan fe let it go. Poor stage manager get left with the task of keeping the microphone away from unscheduled touchers who seem to be always ready with some choice phrases fe tell yu how yu a kip dem dung while beating you down with more than their fair share of persistence. So see me now, doing the only thing stage managers know how to do, hold de fort.
Along came this young man, not more than 20 years old. In other words, him born afta Bob start play music at a higher heights, with a different set of instruments and audience. When all other pleadings to be included in the line-up fell on deaf ears, he duly informed me that he was "one a Bob back-up singers".
CUDDEN LAUGH
Believe me all when de show dun me cudden laugh. Because maybe such a statement had meaning to him that will never be revealed to me. And maybe it is simply this, whatever children love will live forever.
Jackie Lynch Stewart, the new manager at the Bob Marley Museum, makes a habit of engaging her visitors in discussions about their reasons for being there. One mother told her that she really came because of her two children, both under four years old. According to the mother, they are forever singing Bob's songs. As these things go, the mother says she has no idea where they would have heard, much less learned, these songs. But so into it they were that she felt obliged to educate herself about this man and to introduce her children to the museum.
In her presentation at the Kingston leg of the 2006 regional symposia hosted by the JCDC, Diane Jobson spoke of Bob's addressing the children directly, as in Natty Dread. "Children get your culture and don't stay there and jester, for the battle getting hotter and you won't get no supper." It was at this very symposium that in trying to identify which schools were in attendance I came across a group of students from a school in the area in which Bob grew up and created. I asked them if they knew where Bob lived. Not one of them said Trench Town.
Further probing revealed that they were trying to connect him with some 'uptown' area where 'rich people live'. Nothing in the way they had so far been educated and socialised prepared them for connecting themselves with greatness. All this conversation is taking place in the presence of the teacher who had brought them on this 'field trip', so that's another story.
ESTABLISHING SELF CONFIDENCE
My concern was about how the knowledge that Bob did drink cornmeal porridge just like them, sit on de corner where they live, line up fe water at standpipe just like them, etc., might have unleashed in them a quest for accomplishment born of that connection, a confidence in self on which so much learning could be anchored. Instead Bob had been taken from them, "sold I to the merchant ships", perhaps never really introduced to them, reduced to spectacle, symposium subject matter, rich people business.
It is the story of the route that so much about who we are and what we have created has gone. And without it we won't get no supper, no satisfaction, not even at the level of profiting from the creative industries that we have spawned and like Peter Tosh says, we will die like fools for want of wisdom.
But we have to get it first if we expect our children to have it, love it and possess its living dynamic organic nature and essence. Because our children cannot get their culture out of the breeze. And if truly what children love will live forever then we would also be ensuring some very positive patrimony: Live if you want to live, Rastaman vibration, yea, positive!
