(Listen while you read)
The Passing of Bunny Wailer marks the end of a chapter in the book of African mythology. It is the end of the Giants. Many of us do not know what this means. Femi Kuti had a hit song titled Blackman know yourself. To me, this is one of the most important poetic musical lyric messages. African people do not know themselves. There is not enough curriculum in the pedagogic system to educate us, even as we begin to celebrate the critical N.J. Assembly diversity and inclusion education bill being passed by Gov. Murphy.
Bunny Wailer (Neville O'Reilly Livingston) was the last of the Mohicans. He was a Rastaman and one of the pioneers of Reggae music. Without him, there might have been no Bob Marley or even Peter Tosh. Bunny Wailer belonged to the Rastafari Tribe of Nyabinghi. He was at the airport when His Excellency, Emperor Haile Selassie I Ras Tafari, visited Jamaica in 1966 and urged the Rastafarians to move to Shashamane.
In Picture: Bob, Bunny, & Peter
In an interview with the G.Q. reporter, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Bunny Wailer said some want to take the fruit of reggae but don't want to water the root of reggae. In the interview, he spoke highly of Bob Marley as a faithful childhood friend should. He argued that the war that Bob Marley wanted to end between Manley and Seaga has grown to ruin the country's morale.
This was a war of socialism against capitalism, PNP against JLP, with the garrisons pitted against one another, fighting on behalf of their parties to control the island. Kingston emerged as a miniature front in the Cold War in the 60s and the 70s. Tourists may not know this, but in order to understand anything about Jamaica and why it's statistically one of the most violent places on earth, one would have to know something about garrisonism, the unique system by which the island's government functions.
Garrisonism has been described—in a Jamaican report put out by a specially convened panel—as "political tribalism." (Bunny called it "a political tribal massacre" in his classic "Innocent Blood" thirty years ago.) The history of garrisonism can be "supercrudely" summarized as follows. In the 1960s, the island's two rival parties—the liberal People's National Party (PNP) and the conservative Jamaica Labour Party (JLP), Jamaica's version of Democrats and Republicans—started putting up housing projects in Kingston's poorest neighborhoods.
Once the buildings were up, whichever party had built them moved-in its trustworthy supporters and kicked anybody who didn't want to vote their way out of the neighborhood. This is similar to Gerrymandering practices in the United States, which establishes an unfair political advantage for a particular party or group by manipulating district boundaries. In Jamaica, families and friends have torn apart. Children had to change schools because their old school's party affiliation had changed. Many of these displaced ended up in squatters' camps.
Bunny Wailer explained to John Jeremy that one of these Garrisonians was the heir to a Jamaican Drug lord named Lester Coke (real birth name). Christopher Coke became Jamaica's biggest and most powerful drug boss. They call him Dudus. The U.S. Department of Justice had filed an extradition request asking Jamaica's prime minister, Bruce Golding, to hand over Christopher Coke. Coke was heavily fortified and held back police arrest with the help of the community for whom he had developed community programs to help the poor and had so much local support that Jamaican police were unable to enter this neighborhood without community consent. Coke was eventually arrested on drug charges and extradited to the United States in 2010. His arrest had provoked violence among Coke's supporters in West Kingston. He was found guilty and sent to spend 23 years in federal prison.
Bunny Wailer had put out a pro-Dudus dancehall record titled "Don't Touch the President." (President, or Pressy, is one of Dudu's many nicknames.) during the buildup to the Dudus' standoff in Jamaica:
Don't touch the president, inna di residen'.
We confident, we say him innocent.
Don't touch the Robin Hood, up inna neighborhood.
Because him take the bad and turn it into good.
John Jeremy of G.Q. had traveled to Jamaica to find out Why an elder politician of Jamaican culture, Bunny Wailer, would take the side of a notorious drug lord. Is it because of the crowds showing on T.V., in the streets of Kingston, screaming and putting themselves in the way of justice? Or is that he genuinely believes in the innocence of Dudus. (The international news cameras had zeroed in on a nuts-seeming woman with a handwritten cardboard sign comparing Dudus to Jesus Christ, and this was rebroadcast in a hundred countries for weeks as a typical expression of Caribbean chaos.)
The fact of the matter is that Jamaica is a very violent place. With recorded killings of 1,301 in 2020, a new report on Latin America and the Caribbean has revealed that Jamaica now has the region's highest homicide rate at 46.5 per 100,000 people. An attempted assassination of Bob Marley in 1976 left his wife, Rita Marley, and manager Don Taylor seriously injured while Tosh was killed in 1987 during a burglary at his home in Jamaica. Jamaica is a remarkable small island where no one needs to be poor. Reggae music was a revolutionary movement against poverty and oppression (downpressor). All that is unjust and inhumane combined and denounced as Babylon in the Rasta faith, which is peaceful. Bunny Wailer and the rest of the Rasta movement have always stood by the poor.
The whole world is changing rapidly, becoming more aggressively capitalistic. Suppose Jamaica continues to pride itself as a little Miami. In that case, there is no end in sight for violence and materialism and political corruption. Florida is not a great role model to emulate. Bunny Wailer is gone, today March 2, 2021. One thing was clear from the beginning. Bunny Wailer was a great iconic figure and significant to the global African world. His passing is a significant loss to Jamaica and the World. Whether through his songs or his beliefs and commitment, those who knew him would remember him as a very remarkable artist. His art is rooted in conviction and spirituality. The last two years had been tough on legendary Jamaican performers. U-Roy, credited with popularizing the vocal style known as "toasting," died late on Wednesday, February 17, 2021.
May their souls rest in peace, and may peace be with the beautiful people of Jamaica.