We’ll be forever loving Jah: Bob Marley turns 80

Bob Marley (1945-1981) would have turned 80 Thursday, 6 February 2025. (Image: Supplied)

• Dive Deeper
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Dive Deeper

By Mark Heywood

6 Feb 2025

5

Check out the real situation
Nation war against nation
Where did it all begin?
When will it end?
Well, it seems like, total destruction the only solution …
Bob Marley, Real Situation, 1980

On the day young Robert Nesta Marley was born, part of the world – and most of its attention – was convulsed with the “world” war raging, mainly between developed countries. Hitler’s fascist regime was close to defeat and a few months later the first atomic bomb would be dropped by the US on Japan. In every sense, 1945 was a pivotal year, ending a war that represented the collapse of one era and ushering in another from its rubble. 

The “never again” sentiment that followed the genocide in Germany and the mass casualties of war led to the signing of a Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, as well as Covenants on Genocide and Crimes against Humanity.

It’s a strange coincidence that in the year that marks Marley’s 80th birthday that world order should be being deliberately broken apart by a new generation of fascist oligarchs.

A village in central Jamaica is an unlikely point of confluence for many of the loose ends of modern history. But it was. In 1945, Jamaica, once a slave island, was still a British colony, still feeding the West with sugar, coffee and cheap labour. It was a country, still finding an independent political identity, one that would take shape once independence was granted in 1962. Unsurprisingly, given its slave and colonial history, much of that identity would cohere around advancing ideas of freedom and human rights, and would be embodied in the life of its most famous son.

Read more: Reflections on heritage: The road to Nine Mile, Jamaica  

The life of the boy who became Bob Marley is probably among the most well-known in the world. His song,

style="font-weight: 400;">Get Up Stand Up, is as much a global anthem as

style="font-weight: 400;">John Lennon’s Imagine. His face is as well known as Che Guevara’s. Following the 2024 biopic One Love (which I reviewed) many of his songs, mostly released in the 1960s and 1970s, have seen a revival in sales. 

To date, the boy from Nine Mile has sold the equivalent of nearly 150 million albums. But more important than these numbers is the fact that these songs of freedom have carried Marley’s call to arms to every corner of the globe, including South Africa where his records were banned under apartheid.  

I don’t intend to recap Bob’s life today. I’d rather engage in a thought experiment and ask you to imagine what Bob might have done with the missing years between his death from cancer in 1981 at the age of 36 and today. 

It’s an interesting question to ask, particularly at a time when t

style="font-weight: 400;">he Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown, is receiving plaudits. Dylan, born just a few years before Marley, was 40 when Bob died. In the years since, Dylan has dropped another 18 studio-recorded albums. It’s a measure of the lost potential represented in every premature death, making the fight against preventable and relatable death even more urgent. 

Think what Bob might have sung and said had he had the benefit of those 44 years.

Would Bob have visited the democratic South Africa, maybe sung at our inauguration in 1994?

What would Bob have sung about the corruption and callousness of Zimbabwe’s post-independence leaders, whose inauguration he performed at in 1980, particularly after he had warned in Zimbabwe, a song that had appeared on his

style="font-weight: 400;">Survival album, one year before Zimbabwean independence: 

No more internal power struggle
We come together to overcome the little trouble
Soon we’ll find out who is the real revolutionaries,
Cause I don’t want my people to be tricked by mercenaries”  

After turning Ethiopian emperor Heile Sellasie’s 1963 address to the United Nations into his song, War, making it one of his most enduring anthems, what would Bob have sung out against the resilience and now resurgence of racism in the US and Europe and apartheid in Israel?

Until the philosophy
That holds one race superior
And another
Inferior
Is finally, and totally and utterly,
Discredited and abandoned
Then everywhere there’s war

As millions of people succumb to numbness in the face of elites perpetrating ecocide, genocide, democide, femicide (and the poor live it), would he have reissued Redemption Song to rally humanity and help us to emancipate ourselves from the new forms of mental slavery? 

Today, would Marley be working with activists to help

style="font-weight: 400;">free the people with music, as he sang in Trench Town?

Life after death

However, although we might ask all these questions, the great life-after-death paradox is that because of their prophetic nature, and because they spring from an eternal human desire for freedom and joy, Bob’s songs of the seventies can arm us as much for today’s sea of troubles, as they did when he was alive.

In addition, his last two albums pointed to the way his music and politics might have developed if he had not died. 

Uprising, the final album while he was alive, was released on 10 June 1980, a few months before he received his cancer diagnosis. Confrontation was released in 1983, two years after he died. Both albums had a new feel and suggested an evolution in Bob’s style and content: they were more mystical, more joyful, more philosophical and the sound was fuller. This hopeful combination of word, sound and rhythm, celebration, declaration and determination to cry freedom can be heard in songs like

style="font-weight: 400;">Jump Nyabinghi:

Love to see when ya groove with the riddim
’Cause I love to see when you’re dancin’ from within!
It gives great joy to see such sweet togetherness
’Cause everyone’s doin’ and they’re doing their best
’Cause it remind me of the days in Jericho
When we troddin’ down Jericho walls!
These are the days when we’ll trod through Babylon
We keep on troddin’ until Babylon falls!

Yet although there was a more overt spirituality the songs were still as full of politics and prophecy as his songs of a decade earlier, still chanting down Babylon, still denouncing the crazy baldheads. At the heart of all his music is a rejection of inequality, of a world of

style="font-weight: 400;">We and Dem, and a warning about where it would lead human society. 

We no know how we and dem a-go work this out, oy
We no know how we and dem a-go work it out
But someone will have to pay
For the innocent blood
That they shed every day
Oh, children, mark my word

Today the

style="font-weight: 400;">Stiff Necked Fools are as arrogant as they were 50 years ago, but whether Bob would  have imagined the arrogance, cruelty and egos of the “broligarchy” – Musk, Bezos, Zuckerburg – is hard to imagine:

Stiff-necked fools, you think you are cool
To deny me for simplicity.
Yes, you have gone for so long
With your love for vanity now.
Yes, you have got the wrong interpretation
Mixed up with vain imagination.

So, on Bob’s 80th birthday, coming during a time of growing despair, desperation and despots, let’s take heart. Conjure up old man Marley at 80, think about what he might say. But also think about the spirit that endures in his music and his legacy, including that of his sons like Damian, whose jams and lyrics are often as powerful and political as his father’s.

Bob’s contribution to human life is a lasting one. It has not been a dry or destructive ideology. Instead, flowing from a rejection of colonialism, capitalism and racism, as he observed and experienced them, it’s a mixture of riddim, lyrics, spirit, love that lifts your spirits, fires the synapses, makes you want to dance and join the league of soul rebels.  It’s a celebration of the life spirit and that’s what we need to ensure the struggle goes on. DM

Read other writings by Mark Heywood on Bob Marley, music and revolution: Rebel Music – Bob Marley turns 75; Bob Marley Lives! (Still) So Much Trouble in the World; At this uncertain moment ‘Can we free the people with music?’; Democracy and the Writer by Mark Heywood | PEN South Africa