Jamaica is reputed for several innovations such as producing the world’s fastest sprinters, Blue Mountain coffee, finest rum, exotic beaches, luxurious all-inclusive resorts and majestic waterfalls.
It is also the birthplace of late raggae legend, Robert Nesta Marley popularly known as Bob Marley.
Here are nine things you probably don’t know about Bob Marley:
1. Bob Marley was born in 1945 to a white middle-class father and a black mother, in Jamaica.
2. His father was a naval officer who worked for the British government.
3. Marley was the founding member of the original Wailers trio with Peter Tosh and Neville Livingston. While Tosh was killed at his St Andrew home on September 11, 1987, Livingston died at the age of 73 on Tuesday at the Medical Associates Hospital on March 2, 2021.
4. Before his death at the age of 36, Marley had 11 acknowledged children with seven different mothers. He had three children with his wife Rita Marley, and he adopted her two children from previous relationships. However, rumours had it that the famous musicians fathered more than the 11 children officially acknowledged.
5. Bob Marley smoked marijuana because he practised the Rastafarian religion, wherein the use of “ganja.”
The term ‘Rastafarian’ is derived from the ancient Sanskrit language for marijuana, which itself is a Spanish word for cannabis.
6. Apart from music, he was also an advocate for the rights of black people, spoke up against poverty and a fighter against western oppression.
7. Bob Marley was shot in the left arm during a rehearsal for a free concert at National Heroes Park in Kingston, Jamaica, on Dec. 6, 1976. Three of his associates were also shot during the incident.
8. His hit Buffalo Soldier was the singer’s biggest in the UK, reaching number four in May 1983 while his 1977 album Exodus was named Album of the Century by Time Magazine.
9. The singer/songwriter was awarded a posthumous Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001, 20 years after his death.
