CULTURE
Marcus Garvey and Bob Marley: The Shackles Of The Human Mind
‘Redemption Song’ by Bob Marley and The Wailers
“All I ever have
Redemption songs
These songs of freedom
Songs of freedom.”
— Bob Marley, Redemption Song (Outro)
Watched the Bob Marley musical tribute on Saturday evening on BBC and once again cried when Marley sang — in my opinion — his greatest and most powerful creation Redemption Song. It is the final track on Bob Marley and the Wailers’ twelfth album, Uprising, produced by Chris Blackwell and released by Island Records.
This song written by Marley in around 1979 contained essential lyrics derived from a speech given by the Pan-Africanist orator Marcus Garvey (1887–1940) titled The Work That Has Been Done and was composed at the same time Marley had been diagnosed with cancer in his toe.
Marcus Garvey was a highly controversial figure not just because he was an outspoken black man with powerful political views but because of his black separatist views and his relationship with white racists like the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) in the interest of advancing their shared goal of racial separatism.
