Bob Marley's concern about heightening his Africanness

 The headline in the article below in the British newspaper, The Independent, deserves a comment

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/news/bob-marley-blacked-up-to-blend-in-2151047.html

It's not a headline I'd have used if I'd written the article.  But I do believe Bob Marley over-compensated for his fair complexion when living in Trench Town by embracing the culture and becoming as black as everyone else. Not that there would have been much choice. Not too many white folk re-located to Trench Town. It was a choice though that he willingly made, as Marley saw himself as unashamedly black. In I&I : The Natural Mystics, I riff on Bob Marley's sense of his identity.


"I didn’t think I would like a guy with his [fair] complexion,’ Rita said of Bob 

Marley. Rita was dark-skinned, and, conversely, wondered whether her

blackness was part of her attraction to Bob. Marley was so racially

sensitised that she remembered him asking her ‘to rub shoe polish in

his hair to make it more black, make it more African."

This is only one section of a larger argument I make in the book about this vexed and complicated subject.