Ok RootsTafari, I overstand the I's position a bit better now and it's not what I thought at first, but still, the kind of thinking that the I describes with everyone wanting a slice of Africa didn't come from Bob. Like Matthew said, Bob stood for Africa for the Africans and any man who listens to the words of the mans music can tell that, but the side affect of the mans international fame is that certain people don't really check the music for the message, they just like the melody and the beat and so they come and latch onto that. The root of that doesn't lie with Bob though, that is a conception that people bring in themselves, so easy on Bob on that point.
I and I know that Africa is the cradle of mankind. First point of creation without a doubt. But personally, I agree with the I that this 'we are all Africans' philosophy gets taken a bit too literal by many. Yes I, mankind originated in Ethiopia, but mankind also spread to every corner of the earth. People ask I a lot of the time, sometimes mockingly, whether I want to 'repatriate' to Africa as a white man living RastafarI Livity, and I always tell them that it's a foolish question. I can never repatriate to Africa because I don't come from there. Jah works might lead I there some day maybe, but cold and miserable though it is right now, England is where I and I ancestors born and grow, and there is the soil I till, so that is I home.
One thing I can't agree with the I on though still is this mixed relationships thing. I can see where the I is coming from, but to I, if the relationship is founded on love and Righteousness, then nothing can stop that. In the case of Bob Marley, that probably wasn't the case. Welsh plantation overseer and a poor Jamaican country girl... Definately some power thing going on there, and fire burn that. But when it comes to Bob, or any other mix race child, I don't sight them as being just of their fathers ancestry or just of their mothers ancestry. That just isn't the case. It is a mixing of both, so Bob was both Welsh and African. The only reason Ones of mixed race choose to identity with the ancestry of one of their parents over the other is if one parent's culture is more present than the other. So in Bob's case, his father disappeared and left his mother to fend for herself, so he grew up as a country youth in Jamaica and found his African identity through RastafarI. If his father had come along and carted Bob off to Wales to live on a hill farm in the valleys, then he would have grown up with that identity and I and I would probably never know who the man was. If both parents are there and both teach the children right, then they will grow up knowing themselves through both parts of their ancestry. Let I give an example... I know a RastafarI family where the father is an Ethiopian and the mother is Spanish. The child is too young to be talking still, but when she does, she will speak both Spanish and Amharic as well as English. She will know herself through both of her parents lineage, and with RastafarI to guide them, I can see no wrong in that.
Blessed love
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