Bob Marley - Legend and Development Icon

Happy Birthday Legend!

The honorable Robert Nesta “Bob” Marley would have been 76 on this day (February 6, 2021).

We recognise Bob Marley as an icon in international development.

Through the message of his music, which included universal human rights, and his generosity, Bob Marley was both theorist—critiquing “the ‘destructive social forces’ of the modern world’”—and practitioner—communicating to those rendered powerless by systems in the Global North and encouraging them to “challenge existing power relations” (Findlay, 2020).

Bob Marley’s legacy and impact demonstrates why it is important for impacted peoples to lead and own development at all levels—locally, nationally, regionally and globally.

“Marley’s music became very influential in postcolonial movements for development and social change from Australia to Zimbabwe” (Findlay, 2020).

From our Principal Consultant Cara-Marie Findlay’s 2020 Essay,

“Bob Marley’s Music as an Alternative Communicative Channel in Postcolonial Movements for Development and Social Change”

Excerpt from the essay:

The Significance of Referencing Bob Marley

I chose to focus on the music of Bob Marley for several reasons, including he was one of “the first truly global pop stars” (Prestholdt, 2019, p. 70); he used music as an “awareness-raising process that led to processes of collective action” (Tufte, 2017, p. 18), which he saw as an act of resistance; and he exemplifies what Cheryl McEwan defines as a “subaltern.” A subaltern is not simply someone who is generally marginalized or oppressed. A subaltern is “a person or groups of people rendered voiceless and without agency by their social status….people whose voices cannot be heard or that are wilfully ignored in dominant modes of narrative production” (McEwan, 2018, pp. 22-23). Bob Marley refers to these voiceless people as “sufferers” in his song “Babylon System” (Marley & Wailers, 1979).

In 1962, Jamaica—which had been a colony of the United Kingdom, and a colony of Spain before that— became independent. During the 1960s Reggae music emerged as an art form that “spoke of and to the experience of the postcolonial Jamaican underclass,” especially Rastafarians, who were “perceived as dangerous” by Jamaica’s upper class, “and often treated as criminals” (Prestholdt, 2019, p. 80). Reggae presented “the counter-history to the accepted colonial story;” (Hagerman, 2012, p. 385) and was aimed at eliminating the ‘lingering and debilitating modes of thought and action that comprise[d] postcolonial conditions,’ (McEwan, 2018 quoting Myers, 2006, p. 33) in Jamaica.

Messages in Bob Marley’s Music

Bob Marley’s music was heavily influenced by, and intertwined with, his Rastafarian beliefs, there is no separating the music from the beliefs that shaped the man. The “Babylon System” Marley referred to in his music—for example, the 1979 song with the same name—is part of a wider Rastafarian Biblical allegory in which the Global North is as destructive to people of African descent as the kingdom of Babylon was to the Israelites. Marley’s music critiques the “destructive social forces” of the modern world including: “greed, envy, desires for power and control,” (Prestholdt, 2019, p. 79) “racism, classism, dehumanization,” neo-colonialism through “teaching a white version of history,” (Hagerman, 2012, p. 383) and any oppressive system that upholds the ‘institutional models of the elite of the western world,’ (Hagerman, 2012 quoting Johnson-Hill, 1995, p. 383). Marley used his music to communicate to the powerless so they could “understand why they are disempowered,” by making them aware of “the sociocultural conditions that shape one’s life” and “the possibility of their transformation” (Svensson, 2018, p. 11).