The Sunday Times of London ran the following story this week:
"The Prince of Wales will unveil a plan this month to clean up a Yardie ghetto in Jamaica that was home to Bob Marley and the pioneers of reggae. Prince Charles is to replace concrete apartment blocks overrun by marauding gunmen in Kingston, the capital, with traditional lime-washed bungalows surrounded by palm trees."
The story went on to say that The Prince's Foundation, Charles' architectural charity, had drawn up plans to redevelop a section of Trench Town, and that the initiative would mean new homes for 3,000 people. The paper said that Charles' representatives would officially announce the plan in Jamaica later in October.
Bob Marley was not overly fond of royalty--with the exception of the Emperor Haile Selassie, who is revered as a God by Rastafari. Prince Charles and Bob Marley's paths did cross: Bob played at the Indepedence Day celebrations in Zimbabwe in 1980 which Prince Charles attended.
But Bob was about the lower classes, not the high-born; he was concerned with concrete jungles, not towering castles. With such songs as " Trench Town," "Trench Town Rock," and "No Woman, No Cry," Bob celebrated his rough roots in Trench Town , a slum area in Jamaica's capitol city of Kingston.
Trench Town was developed as low-income housing in the 1920s. Its planners hoped that the area would provide comfortable and dignified housing for war veterans, but it was soon in decline.
Between 1921 and 1943, the population in the Kingston metro area doubled from 60,000 to 120,000. One city survey found an average density of 3.6 people per room. In Trench Town around the time Marley was growing up, it became not uncommon for 8 people to share a single room.
Yet this was the same area that inspired some of Marley's greatest music. He famously sang of sitting in a "government yard" in Trench Town in the song "No Woman, No Cry." Music was the star attraction in the Trench Town of Marley's youth. Songs blasted from jukeboxes in bars, from storefront churches, from amateur musicians harmonizing with one another. Sound systems--DJ booths on wheels--went up and down the streets, vying for listeners.
Marley and his fellow Wailers, Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer, practiced in the same streets, in these same yards, honing their vocals and polishing the songs that would bring them stardom.
Bob didn't idealize poverty. He condemned the "Rat Race," and the "Babylon System" that he said oppressed the poor. But he made music, in part, to provide for his family and to lift himself and those close to him out of the land of the sufferers. He drove a BMW, and when reporters asked him about it, he said it stood for " Bob Marley and the Wailers."
Bob made music that served as an alternative vision to the colonial system; he created songs that he hoped would help free people from a mindset of self-loathing and dependence.
On Sunday, August 5, 1962, Jamaica celebrated its first Independence Day. Church bells were tolled in Port Antonio. There were colorful, traditional Jonkanoo dances in the roadways of Ocho Rios. Everywhere around the island, the Union Jack was lowered, and the black, gold and green Jamaican flag was raised to the sky. It was among Jamaica's proudest moments.
That's why it's eyebrow-raising, decades after Bob's death, almost a half century after Jamaica's independence from Britain, that the island is getting help from British royalty. Yes, Jamaica could probably use the assistance. And no, there's nothing really wrong with accepting a hand when you need a leg up. But certainly many Jamaicans must long for the days when they looked for inspiration from the King of Reggae and not a Prince of England. To paraphrase Marley, none but ourselves can free our minds.
Christopher John Farley is the author of the new biography "Before the Legend: The Rise of Bob Marley." Farley is also the author of the new novel "Kingston by Starlight."
For more about Farley's work, visit Myspace.com/cjfarley
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