ADDIS ABABA (AFP) – Ethiopia is preparing a massive party next month to mark the 60th birthday of late reggae superstar Bob Marley, the first time the annual event has been held outside the singer’s native Jamaica.
Some 200,000 people are expected to attend the giant celebration featuring concerts from scores of African and international musicians that will start five days before Marley’s February 6 birthday, organizers said Friday.
Marley’s widow, Rita, chose Ethiopia as the site of this year’s commemoration “Africa Unite” for symbolic reasons, Desta Meghoo-Peddie, president of the Bob Marley Foundation told reporters here.
Not only is former Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie, born Ras Tafari, the spiritual leader of the rastafarian movement that Marley embraced and popularized with his music but Addis Ababa is home to the African Union.
“It was always Bob Marley’s desire to return to Ethiopia and to be a rastafarian,” Meghoo-Peddie said.
But she adamantly denied widespread reports that Rita Marley intended to exhume her late husband’s remains in Jamaica and rebury them on Ethiopian soil.
“There is no plan to return the remains of Bob Marley to Ethiopia on February 6,” she said. “No body is being exhumed.”
Marley, famed for hits such as “No Woman No Cry,” died from brain cancer at the age of 36 in 1981 but his music remains hugely popular around the world, especially in the Caribbean and Africa.
The highlight of the month-long festivities will be a gala concert on February 6 that will feature the Marley family, Senegalese musicians Babaa Maal and Youssou N’Dour, singer Angelique Kidjo from Benin and American calypso king Harry Belafonte (news), organizers said.
The celebration will also feature other concerns, the launch of Rita Marley’s biography entitled “My Life with Bob Marley,” an exhibition of African art and three conferences: on African unity, women and youth, they said.
Proceeds from the sale of CDs and DVDs from the concerts will be given to charity with a portion set aside for Somalian victims of the December 26 tsunami.
Jamaicans angry over reburial plans
KINGSTON, Jamaica (AP: Jan 13) – Jamaicans reacted angrily Thursday to plans by Bob Marley’s widow to exhume the reggae legend’s remains and rebury them in Ethiopia, an African country holy to Rastafarians, saying it would rob the Caribbean island of its national heritage.
The news ignited radio call-in programs and Internet chat rooms in Jamaica and around the globe, with most people coming down strongly against moving the remains of the singer, who died of cancer in 1981 at age 36. One university professor said such a deed would meet “serious hostility.”
“Has Rita lost her mind?” P. Chin wrote in a letter published Thursday in Jamaica’s most widely read newspaper, The Gleaner. “Bob loved Jamaica. He wouldn’t have made it his home if it were otherwise.”
Speaking Wednesday in Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, Rita Marley said she was working on bringing her husband’s remains to his “spiritual resting place.”
She said the reburial would occur after February celebrations in Jamaica and Ethiopia marking Bob Marley’s 60th birthday and has the support of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and Ethiopian government officials.
“We are working on bringing his remains to Ethiopia,” said Rita Marley, a former backup singer for her late husband’s band, The Wailers. “It is part of Bob’s own mission.”
The announcement brought immediate controversy and confusion. In Kingston, the Bob Marley Foundation, a charity headed by Rita Marley, denied reports of her statement in Ethiopia, and a spokesman for the family later issued a statement quoting her as saying that Jamaica “will remain the resting place for Bob Marley for the foreseeable future.”
A Cuban-born Jamaican citizen who now lives in the West African country of Ghana, Mrs. Marley, 58, has had an uneasy relationship with her adopted Caribbean homeland, where some complain she has exploited her late husband’s image and music for commercial gain.
Popular host Cliff Hughes voiced opposition to moving Marley’s body on his nightly show on Jamaica’s Power 106 radio.
“The Marley family is going to have to convince me that this is what Bob wanted,” Hughes said Wednesday. “He’s part of Jamaica’s national heritage. With the greatest respect, he belongs to the Marley family, and he belongs to the people of Jamaica.”
Born in 1945, Marley grew up in the gritty shantytowns of Kingston and later shot to global stardom with hits like I Shot the Sheriff and No Woman, No Cry. His poignant lyrics promoting social justice and African unity made him an icon in developing countries.
Marley was given a state funeral and buried along with his Gibson guitar and bible in a marble mausoleum at his birthplace of Nine Mile, a rugged hamlet in the green hills of northern Jamaica that’s popular with tourists. A statue of Marley graces the entrance to the national sports stadium in Kingston.
Rita Marley said her late husband would be reburied in Shashemene, 250 kilometres south of Addis Ababa, where several hundred Rastafarians have lived since they were given land by Ethiopia’s last emperor, Haile Selassie.
Rastafarians worshipped Selassie as their living god, a belief based on the prophecy by Jamaican civil rights leader Marcus Garvey that a black man would be crowned king in Africa.
A devout Rastafarian, Marley’s lyrics were laden with references to the faith, whose followers preach a oneness with nature, grow their hair uncombed into dreadlocks and smoke marijuana as a sacrament.
Rupert Lewis, a political science professor at the University of the West Indies in Kingston, said Marley is a crucial part of Jamaica’s identity and that any attempt to move his remains would be met by “serious hostility” on the island of 2.6 million.
“The people would not allow that body to physically leave Jamaica,” said Lewis. “He’s a focal point of the Jamaican identity. What it means to be Jamaican is inherently bound up in Bob Marley.”
Others saw no problem with the idea.
“She feels he wants to be in Africa? Go ahead,” broadcaster Allen Magnus said during his morning program on radio RJR. “She has the right. It’s her husband.”
This isn’t the first time that Rita Marley has created a stir. While promoting her autobiography last year, she was quoted in Britain’s Daily Mirror tabloid as saying that Bob had raped her once. She later said she was misinterpreted, but the remarks angered many of the late singer’s faithful.
The latest uproar comes less than a month after Marley’s estate announced plans to lobby the government to make the revered artist a national hero, Jamaica’s highest honour.
Earlier Report: King of Reggae to be exhumed for reburial in Ethiopia
ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia (AP: Jan 12) — The wife of reggae star Bob Marley said Wednesday that she plans to exhume his remains in Jamaica and rebury them in his “spiritual resting place,” Ethiopia.
The reburial is set for an unspecified date after monthlong celebrations of the 60th anniversary of Marley’s birth to be held next month in Ethiopia. Both the Ethiopian church and government officials have expressed support for the project, Rita Marley told The Associated Press.
“We are working on bringing his remains to Ethiopia,” said Rita, a former backing singer for Marley’s band, The Wailers. “It is part of Bob’s own mission.”
Marley was born in St. Ann, Jamaica, in 1945. He died of cancer in 1981.
Rita Marley said her husband would be reburied in Shashemene, 250 kilometers (155 miles) south of Addis Ababa where several hundred Rastafarians have lived since they were given land by Ethiopia’s last emperor, Haile Selassie.
Hundreds of thousands of Jamaicans embraced Haile as their living god and head of the Rastafarian religious movement.
Marley was a devout Rastafarian, a faith whose followers preach a oneness with nature, grow their hair into long matted strands called dreadlocks and smoke marijuana as a sacrament.
“Bob’s whole life is about Africa, it is not about Jamaica,” said Rita, a Cuban-born singer who married Marley in 1966.
“How can you give up a continent for an island? He has a right for his remains to be where he would love them to be. This was his mission. Ethiopia is his spiritual resting place,” she said. “With the 60th anniversary this year, the impact is there and the time is right.”
Together with the African Union and the U.N. children’s agency, Rita Marley has organized celebrations in Ethiopia, including a concert on Marley’s birthday, February 6, to be held in Addis Ababa.
The monthlong celebration, dubbed “Africa Unite” after one of Marley’s songs, aims to raise funds to help poor families in Ethiopia.
The Marley Family, Senegal’s Baaba Maal and Youssou N’Dour, Angelique Kidjo of Benin and other African and reggae artists will perform as part of the US$1 million (euro760,000) program.
The event is expected to be broadcast in Africa and beyond.
