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Every man gotta right

To decide his own destiny

And in this judgment

There is no partiality….’

Those opening lines have been for me a life long
anthem of strength and self-determination. Till tomorrow as we say back
home, that song by Bob Marley gives me gooseflesh. The reggae rhythm
grabs you by the gut and suffuses your core. It has the gravity,
sagacity and simplicity of those truths held to be self evident and
those pursuits that are the equal and unfettered right of all human
beings, regardless of gender: liberty and happiness. The album title is
Survival and it is a collection of perfect gems.

Take ‘Babylon System is the vampire

Sucking the blood of the sufferers day by day

Building church and university

Deceiving the people continually

Me say them graduating thieves

And murderers, look out now…’

Or even the projection of a society bent on destroying itself:

‘In this age of technological inhumanity

Scientific atrocity, atomic misphilosophy

Nuclear misenergy…

It’s a world that forces lifelong insecurity

All togther now we’re the survivors,

Yes, the black survivors’

Then there are also tracks like Top Rankin’, Ride Natty Ride, So Much Trouble and of course One Drop:

‘We refuse to be

What you wanted us to be

We are what we are

And that’s the way it’s going to be:

(If you don’t know)’

This is one of those collections you inevitably
buy ten times over. I have it in two versions vinyl and CD. Friends
forget to return it, some relative stranger decides that you will not
mind her borrowing it, or it disappears at the end of a party. One
really has no time to waste getting angry, just buy a replacement
because your library has no meaning without it and it is actually a
duty to spread its message to people everywhere.

I am old fashioned I do not do music feeding
directly into my head. I don’t walk around with what I consider to be
messy unhygienic knobs plugged into my ears ,giving me earache and
messing with my body. I prefer my music to envelope me and fill the
atmosphere around me, not lock out the rest of the world, and this is
one anthem that has everything to do with Africans individually and
collectively, and the rest of the world.

‘To divide and rule

Could only tear us apart

In everyman chest

There beats a heart…

Natty trash it ina Zimbabwe

Mash it up ina Zimbabwe

Set it up ina Zimbabwe

Africans a liberate Zimbabawe

Africans a liberate Zimbabwe’

A song of triumph thirty years ago, an anthem in
the decade that followed Marley lyrics remain ever present as an agenda
for today not only in Zimbabwe.

‘So soon we’ll find out

Who is the real revolutionary

And I don’t want my people

To be tricked by mercenaries’

The whole album is a combination of exhortations,
a rallying to arms, a preaching of history and a celebration of African
spirit in the best of this continent’s traditions of telling our
stories in many voices.

Like Fela Anikulapo –Kuti, Marley stands out as a
chronicler of his generation whose words have a message for all times
because of the truths they speak. Each age has its own criers and
speaks in its own language though it is sometime hard these days to
distill a message of lasting value from the popular music of the
present.

But since this article is not a critique of today’s sound but an
appreciation of yesterday’s perhaps it is best to say that what you
hear depends on how you listen and whether you do so in the language of
today or of yesterday. For my money, Marley rocks and one day Zimbabwe
will rock in that same way again.