Dr. Luis Dias
The 2024 biographical drama musical film ‘Bob Marley: One Love’ based on the life of the eponymous reggae singer and songwriter (1945-1981), brilliantly played by British actor Kingsley Ben-Adir, reminded me how tragically and unnecessarily he died, aged just 36. Marley would have turned 80 this February.
A lifelong lover of football, Marley injured his right big toe while playing in 1977. It was eventually discovered that he had a ‘rare’ skin cancer (acral lentiginous melanoma) under the toenail. I had never heard of it before and looked it up.
It led me to an article in The Guardian by Neil Singh, a primary care physician and senior teaching fellow in the department of primary care and public health at Brighton and Sussex Medical School, titled ‘Decolonising dermatology: why black and brown skin need better treatment’ (August 2020).
Singh writes: “Skin conditions are more than just a nuisance – they can kill. Bob Marley’s early death from skin cancer is totemic, and not just because he was a musical giant. His story reminds us of the extra complications that black patients have to navigate when seeking healthcare, and how our health systems are set up in a way that has improved treatment for white patients while leaving people of colour behind.”
“Marley first told his friends that something was wrong in the summer of 1977. During a game of football in Paris, he injured his right big toe, and his toenail became painful. He admitted it was not the first time – he’d had a spot under his nail for a few years, and assumed it was a tiny bruise. He had to see two doctors before he was offered a biopsy, which confirmed the deadliest kind of skin cancer: acral lentiginous melanoma.”
“The kind of melanoma that Marley developed, and which is by far the most common subtype in dark-skinned people, was not on the radar of most doctors. In 1977, the year Marley first developed symptoms, the world’s most popular medical textbook, the Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy, published its 13th edition. It has entries on the three subtypes of melanoma that are most common in pale skin, but acral lentiginous melanoma isn’t even mentioned.”
As I recall, it wasn’t mentioned in my undergraduate dermatology textbooks in the 1980s either. Judging from Singh’s article not that much has changed even in the 2020s: “As a primary care physician, I am the first person people bring their rashes to, and nearly all doctors examine skin several times every day. But our training is woefully lacking, leaving medics entirely unprepared to serve our patients of colour.”
Critical reception of ‘One Love’ (available on Netflix) has been lukewarm, saying “it doesn’t do justice to its brilliant subject.” But I found it a welcome opportunity to take a fresh look at his life and contextualise his many songs that we still know better only as party anthems.
For instance, ‘No Woman, No Cry’ (from Marley’s 1974 album ‘Natty Dread’) is maybe a telling example of the importance of punctuation. It was only recently that I was enlightened that the song title does not refer to the grief a woman can cause in a man’s life. Quite the reverse: if one inserts a comma between the first two words, it actually offers solace to a woman, or to all women: “No, woman, no[don’t] cry.” “Little darling, please don’t shed no tears.” “Everything’s gonna be alright.” It is almost certainly a love song to his wife Rita (it is the title of her autobiography) with clear references to their shared youth in Trenchtown in Kingston, Jamaica. It is worth noting, however, that both of them had extra-marital affairs.
A lot of Bob Marley songs speak of love and peace in a much wider sense, deeply influenced by his staunch belief in Rastafarianism. The film ends with the One Love Peace concert held on April 22, 1978 at the National Stadium in Kingston, in the midst of a civil war in Jamaica. Bob Marley and The Wailers were the draw at that concert, and its unforgettable moment came when, in the middle of the performance of ‘Jamming’, Marley joined the hands of the two sworn political rivals Michael Manley and Edward Seaga.
If only peace could be won that easily. But it underscored how much Marley believed music could be a vehicle for the cause.
Equally many of Marley’s songs are a call to action. ‘Get Up Stand Up’ (1973) was written after seeing first-hand the poverty and injustice in Haiti while on tour there. Fittingly, it was the last song he ever performed on stage in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania on September 23, 1980.
Marley’s 1976 song ‘War’ seems antithetical to the peace activist and icon that he has become. Its lyrics are in fact almost verbatim the speech given by Ethiopian Emperor, Haile Selassie I (whom Marley revered as the incarnation of God, referring to him as ‘Ras Tafari’, ‘Jah’ or ‘The Lion of Judah’ in many of his songs) before the Eighteenth Session of UN General Assembly on October 4, 1963. They are as pertinent today as then. The remainder of Selassie’s speech, which was not used in Marley’s song, urges us to “become members of a new race, overcoming petty prejudice, owing our ultimate allegiance not to nations but to our fellow men within the human community.”
The Biblical terms in Rastafarianism (or Rastafari) have quite different connotations to the norm. It is Afrocentric and focuses on the African diaspora. Rastafari and Pan-Africanism are inextricably intertwined.
So ‘Babylon’ refers to white colonialism’s systematic abuse of the African diaspora, driven by capitalism and materialism. ‘Zion’ in contrast is the metaphorical ‘Promised Land’ of unity, peace and freedom, sometimes also referring to the ‘holy land’ not of Israel but of Selassie’s Ethiopia. And ‘Exodus’ is similarly a figurative return to that ‘Zion.’ Its essence is freedom
from oppression.
So ‘Iron Lion Zion’ (1972) is a Rastafari hymn to the God Marley believed in, and to freedom.
There is speculation in cyberspace lately: had Marley not died so needlessly from an easily curable cancer, had it been fully excised in time, had he been alive today, where would he have stood on Israel-Palestine?
His son Ziggy Marley, who is married to an Israeli of Iranian-Jewish descent, seems to be misusing the literal Old Testament references in his illustrious father’s music to infer a support for the ethno-nationalist state of Israel. Could the legacy of Marley Sr. be hijacked altogether?
If one studies Bob Marley’s song lyrics and their context, it is immediately apparent he stood with the oppressed everywhere. Take just the lyrics of ‘War’, which speaks of a world where “the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned,” “there are no longer first-class and second-class citizens of any nation,” “basic human rights are guaranteed to all,” “rule of international morality”, “We know we shall win, as we are confident in the victory of good over evil.”
I desperately want to believe that “every little thing’s gonna be alright.” We all could do with Bob Marley’s ‘positive vibration’.
