BOB MARLEY'S death in 1981 was an international news event and reports that his widow, Rita, planned to exhume his body from Nine Miles in St. Ann and re-inter the remains of Jamaica's most famous citizen at Shashemane in Ethiopia were no less so.About 9:00 a.m. on Wednesday a story by an Associated Press writer was posted on the Yahoo homepage, tagged '57 minutes ago'. It would get as far as CNN before the Marley Foundation reported that Rita Marley denied having said so.
It is not yet a pattern, but it was the second report of an about-face that Mrs. Marley was making about her husband in a year. She had earlier backtracked on allegations, made in her autobiography, that he raped her.
If, indeed, Mrs. Marley had decided to exhume Bob Marley's body and rebury him in Ethiopia for his 60th birthday, February 6, 2005, the debates and furore would have been unending. And, after all, notably in the famous Neville Willoughby interview, Bob Marley had said that he was intent on going to Africa to live, saying that "I haffi live near my father".
However, it was Bob Marley who refused to have a piece of his body cut off and, in so doing, sealed his fate, despite subsequent attempts at cancer treatment. It is highly unlikely, then, that a man who did not want to lose a toe would want his body, all at once or piece by piece, to be moved thousands of miles. It would certainly be a great loss for Jamaica.
It is interesting, though, that this story, denied or not, comes at a time when there was a campaign of sorts to make Marley a National Hero. We use 'was' because that idea seems to have fizzled, certainly in public prominence. It would make for intriguing discussion if there was a campaign to have a person made a National Hero even if his remains have been removed to another country.
Alas, that battle will never be.
Marley's remains belong in Jamaica. Certainly, a widow has first say over what happens to her husband's remains, but Robert Marley's achievements were far from a football striker's solo run. This man, who also loved football, was part of a team that included persons as disparate as Lee Scratch Perry and the person who named a hymn book Redemption Song that is in a church near Nine Miles, which Bob Marley would have been exposed to as a child.
To relocate Bob Marley's body would be to take away an irreplaceable piece of Jamaica, as well as insult the many who have contributed to his success and worldwide fame.
