The Missing Piece of the Bob Marley Biopic

Nearly 20 years ago, during one of many family trips back to Ethiopia, I spent months wandering through the sprawling capital city. All summer, it seemed, the drivers and cyclists of Addis Ababa were blasting the Ethiopian pop star Teddy Afro’s “Promise,” an infectious, reggae-inflected ode more often referred to by the name of the musician it lionizes: “Bob Marley.”

That 2005 song for his commitment to Africa—and argued, more than 23 years after his death, that he be reburied in the motherland. (When he died, Marley was buried inside a small Ethiopian Orthodox–style church in Nine Mile, the hilltop Jamaican village where he was born.) Marley’s wife, Rita, at the time that she intended to exhume his remains, explaining that he saw Ethiopia as his “spiritual resting place.” Though he’s most from British rule, which he helped commemorate with a 1980 concert. Crucial to his Rastafari worldview, which he embedded in his music, was a reverence for Africa as the source of Black life.