Bob Marley
Robert Nesta Marley
1945 - 1981

In 1944 Captain Norval Sinclair Marley of the British West Indian Regiment, was appointed to the Crown lands in the parish of St. Ann. Here he came to know the 17-year-old Cedella Malcolm, who was a black African girl of a well-known family. Captain Marley and Cedella later got pregnant, and were married on June 9th in 1944. Bob Marley would later say with some bitterness: ”White guy get the black woman and breed her. I´m born in Babylon, my father, a guy who got together with my mother, he´s a English… a guy who was captain in the Army, go to war. You can´t get more Babylon than that! You know what I mean?”. He would also say on many occasions that he was born fatherless, for more than one reason. His father left his mother already when she was pregnant and hardly ever made any contact with her after that. But nevertheless, on February 6th in 1945, Nesta Robert Marley was born in the hamlet of Camden Hall, located in parish of St. Ann. And Bob Marley was a special person right from the start. Already as a five-year-old, people came to the Marley´s to get little Bob to read their palms as a fortuneteller. And very often his predictions would come through. ”The finger of the Lord is upon the boy”, his grandfather would say. Bob was also a bright young man, he was often found alone in deep thoughts, philosophizing about adult issues, and he started school when he was only four-years-old because the teacher said he had the intelligence of someone twice as old. Bob him self, would later say: ”Me not have education, me have inspiration. If I was educated I would be a damn fool.”

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