Personal tribute to reggae icon Marley

The one thing that struck Scottish director Kevin MacDonald when shooting ‘The Last King of Scotland’ in Uganda was the popularity of Bob Marley.

Flags and T-shirts bearing the reggae icon’s image in the slums of Kampala stayed with him, even after shooting his 2006 Oscar winning film on the Ugandan dictator.

Last year, while filming in Tunisia, after the political upheavals, he heard Bob Marley’s songs and words from his music written on the wall, especially: ‘Get up, Stand up, Stand up for your rights.’

A few years ago Chris Blackwell, the founder of Island Records, the label that distributed Bob’s music internationally, had approached MacDonald with an idea to make a film about the musician’s 60th birthday celebrations in Ethiopia, but nothing came of the project.

At the same time, Hollywood director Martin Scorsese was lined up to make a biopic but he passed up the offer due to a busy schedule. So Blackwell recommended MacDonald to take up the film.

Challenging

There have been dozens of concert films, biographies, DVDs and unauthorised videos since the death of the ‘King of Reggae’ in 1981, so what is different about MacDonald’s “Marley”, which is currently showing at theatres in Nairobi.

For one, this is the first project made with the complete co-operation of the Marley family; widow Rita and children Ziggy and Cedella open up and reveal very personal details of the sometimes happy but often turbulent life in the Marley household.

The director’s task was challenging because there is no footage of the first decade of Bob’s career, until 1973, when he broke internationally.

To his credit, MacDonald leaves the story in the hands of musicians who worked alongside Bob, like the only surviving member of the original Wailers group, Neville “Bunny” Livingston.

This film is longer, at two and a half hours, than your usual full-length features, but it’s worth sitting through it.

“I was contracted to make a two hour film,” says MacDonald, “But I just had so much good stuff, so we agreed with the producer to take out everything we could and leave the film where it is.”

It has been interesting to hear the Marley family say there are aspects to Bob’s life that they, themselves, only came to terms with after watching the film.

“As his children, we walk way from this experience with some knowledge of dad’s life that we didn’t know,” says daughter Cedella. The early part of the film is anchored on the narrative of the usually reticent Bunny Wailer, who also speaks about the racial prejudice that this mixed race boy from the deep countryside of Jamaica had to face.

“He was the only red pickney because everyone else was black,” Bunny says of Bob in the film. “He was worse than teased; he was rejected. He discovered that the guitar was his way out of this situation.”

Insights

There are some fresh insights in “Marley” like the interviews with Bob’s white relatives, his half sister Constance and his cousin Peter, who MacDonald says “nobody had thought to speak with before.”

It’s priceless to watch their reactions on camera when asked to listen to the lyrics for the song “The Corner Stone” which Bob apparently wrote as a reaction to the rejection by his father’s relatives.

Modelling themselves on American bands of the time like The Temptations and Frankie Lymon, Bob together with Bunny and a lanky fellow from the ghettos of Kingston called Peter Tosh formed The Teenagers, in 1962.

The group evolved to be The Wailers, under the tutelage of legendary Jamaican musician, Joe Higgs. It took a gruelling two years of rehearsals, including singing at a cemetery at 2 am, to deal with any stage fright, before Higgs was ready to unveil the band to the public.

Naturally, there is considerable time spent on Bob’s complicated marriage, to Rita Marley, whom he left within two days of their wedding, in 1966, to travel to find a job in the US.

Women
Then there were of course the other women in his life, like Pascaline Bongo, daughter of former Gabon President Omar Bongo, who met Bob in the US and arranged for The Wailers to play their first ever gig on African soil, in 1980.

Miss World 1976, Cindy Breakspear, whose liaison with Bob excited the British tabloid press, plays a prominent part in the documentary with very intimate recollections of her time with Bob right until his death in 1981.

“Bob was not a womaniser,” his friend and art director for the Wailers, Neville Carrick says. “It is women who came to him.”

For Ziggy Marley, the testimony of Waltraud Ullrich, the German nurse who took care of his father during those final days in late 1980 and early 1981 when his cancer had been diagnosed as terminal is the most profound part of the documentary.

She talks of a special connection with her famous patient, whom she called Bobby, and the film shows an autographed copy of the album “Exodus” that he gave her as a Christmas gift in 1980, less than five months before his death.