Marley – an international artist and ‘soul rebel’ – looked like one of the ‘cousins down the At a time when there was little social capital to be gained from being young, gifted and Māori, Many more could relate to the look and feel of the musicians and actors –īlack, poor and on the margins of the law especially with regards to the smoking of Marijuana.

Some of the sufferersĬould also appreciate the island aesthetic of rudebwoy/RasTafari films such as The Harder TheyĬome with its roots reggae soundtrack. In Britain), arriving African students, or returning Māori and Pasifika merchant seamen,Ī few of whom had passed directly through Jamaica.

through relatives living abroad (especially However, the predominantĭancehall format – the’45 single – entered Aotearoa NZ in a subterranean fashion via the same routes travelledīy Black Power literature, i.e. Island Records releases dominated reggae sales in record shops. The reception of Burning Spear and other roots bands such as Black UhuruĪnd Culture deepened this impact. The far-reaching impact of Marley among the youth. Such as Rastaman Vibration and Babylon by Bus, consolidated Of Catch a Fire and Burning, followed by new material Natty Dread album marked the definitive arrival of the genre. Known to some already, the release in 1975 of Bob Marley and the Wailers’ Spiritual Blackness on indigenous grounds. And, recalling Tigilau Ness’s motif of kowhaiwhai dreadlocks, we shall witness, through RasTafari, the inhabitation of We shall examine the renewal of a maligned indigenous culture through the cultivation of a We shall retrieveĪ whakapapa of mana motuhake (self determination)īetween Ethiopia and Aotearoa. In this chapter we will consider these groundings with RasTafari. And they decided to make it their faith too. The music, of a faith cultivated in the Caribbean, which professedĮthiopia as the root and Haile Selassie I as the agent of redemption. Yet some activistsĪnd gang members paid closer attention to the transmission, through No surprise, then, that roots reggae was sometimes met with consternation by elders, although much of the issue revolved specificallyĪround the smoking of Marijuana, the wisdom weed. That activists had deployed against the Babylon system in contradistinction to the Te Aute Old Boy tradition of tactful engagement. In many ways, Marley’s message and demeanour vindicated the radical oppositional strategies Marley preached to ‘get up stand up’ supported the radical engagements in the public sphere prompted by Black Aotearoa NZ is no exception to this trend wherein the direct action message that Bob The last 40 years roots reggae music has been the key medium for the dissemination of the RasTafari message from Jamaica to

Guerrilla bob marley