: What You Didn't Know About Bob Marley,

One of which is the white ex-naval officer who
fathered him was a British captain from Essex. Tall,
imperious and imposing, especially on horseback,
Captain Norval Sinclair Marley roamed the
plantations of Jamaica bedding many of the teenage
daughters of the estate workers he was supposed to
oversee. According to local gossip, he seems to have
been a British naval captain who came from Essex
and had once served in India, but he ended up
working for the British colonial service in the
Jamaican backwoods in the Forties.
By then, Marley was at least 50 years old, yet his
brief liaisons resulted in a number of children. And
one of his lovers was 18-year-old gospel singer
Cedella Booker. Their son, Robert Nesta Marley, was born in 1945 and spent his formative years living in
considerable poverty in the slums of Jamaica.
He might have lived out his life in utter obscurity
were it not for his musical talent which would propel
him to super-stardom as Bob Marley, the King of
Reggae, one of the biggest record industry earners of all time. Today, more than 30 years after his death, his estate is worth an incredible $1billion.
The extraordinary story of how the dreadlocked
musician rose from such obscurity to become one of
the demi-gods of popular music from the Seventies
to the present day is the subject of a fascinating new documentary film which, for the first time, spells out the truth about his ancestry.
When he was growing up, Marley looked so different
from his black family that he was often known as ‘the German’, because in contrast to them he looked
somewhat European. Feeling an outsider in both the
black and white communities, his isolation became
the driving force behind his will to succeed.
His thin face reflects many of his father’s aquiline
features — not that young Robert had much chance
to discover that for himself. For Captain Marley did
not tarry long after his son’s birth. Although he
provided some financial support, there was little
contact between father and son as the boy was
growing up.
Then, when Bob was just ten, Captain Marley died
suddenly of a heart attack.
His mother Cedella, still only 28, was left in such
extreme poverty that she was forced to make her
way to Jamaica’s capital, Kingston, in search of work,
leaving her young son with her family.
H e eventually followed her to Kingston, where they
settled in a corrugated-iron shack in a street with
open sewers in the Trenchtown area, one of the
roughest parts of the capital.
Here, Marley was confronted in the starkest terms
with the reality of his mixed parentage.
Bob Marley and wife Rita Anderson on their wedding
day in 1966
He was taunted mercilessly by his peers for standing out from the crowd. Indeed, he longed so much to fit in that, as his 65-year-old widow Rita has recently revealed, he used to black his face with boot polish.
She says he even married her — when he was 21 and she 19 —because, unlike him, she was completely black.
But aside from his struggles for acceptance, Marley
had another yearning: to be famous.
He formed a group, the Wailers, with his childhood
friends, including Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer,
Marley’s stepbrother.
The trio were so poor they made their own guitars
with strings fashioned from stripped electrical wiring. And such was Marley’s drive that he forced them to rehearse U.S. R&B songs and the new local music called ska for 18 hours a day.
At first, they saw little reward for their efforts. For
years, Marley was earning just £3 a week.
Only when he embraced Rastafarianism, with its
emphasis on black pride and marijuana smoking as a sacrament, did he find his vocation. At the same
time, his band moved on to the new, slower reggae
beat.
By 1971, he had his own record company funded by
a Jamaican soccer star, and his first big hit,
Trenchtown Rock. This success led to a meeting with
Island Records’ boss Chris Blackwell, who promoted
the group internationally.
But family and friends, speaking out for the first time in the new film, reveal that because Bob was so
single-minded about his career those close to him
were often neglected.
His daughter Cedella, named after Bob’s mother,
seems during conversations in the film to be quite
bewildered at having to share her father with so
many fans across the globe — not to mention his ten other children, many of them illegitimate and the result of the many affairs he conducted during his marriage.
Marley had at least seven mistresses, including 1976 Jamaican Miss World Cindy Breakspeare.
The women themselves say he was so shy that they
made all the running. Several even fell pregnant by
him at the same time: this year, three of his sons by
different women will all turn 40.
His daughter Cedella is 44, a successful
businesswoman with three children who lives in
Miami.
She is still visibly hurt when she remembers that it
was often more important to her father to be Bob
Marley the superstar than a good parent — perhaps
because he himself had never had a good example
given by his own father’s absence.
On one occasion, she recalls being bullied by a girl at school and fully expected him to defend her.
Instead, when he came to confront the girl and she
said ‘Oh my God, it’s Bob Marley! Can I have your
autograph?’ he meekly complied.
By the time he held his now famous One Love Peace
Concert in Kingston in 1978, Marley had been
elevated to the status of local saint — though his
dream of peace and harmony were not shared by
everyone.
After independence from the British in 1962, the
bitter hatred of rival political parties had led to gang
warfare in the streets. Marley himself narrowly
escaped serious injury when a bullet grazed his
chest.
At the concert, he proudly revealed the scar on stage to howls of approval from the crowd.
Then, in front of 30,000 people, he invited the bitter
political opponents Prime Minister Michael Manley
and his Right-wing challenger Edward Seaga on
stage and joined their hands above his head,
begging them to be reconciled.
Marley went on to perform in the Gabon in Africa -
where the president’s daughter fell in love with him -
and at Zimbabwe’s independence celebrations in
1980, long before the world learned the full truth
about Robert Mugabe.
But time was running out for the man with the
mission to spread harmony. In a game of football
several years earlier, Marley had suffered an
apparently trivial accident that would lead to his
death aged only 36.
Died too young: The reggae music died of cancer
aged 36 in Miami Spiked on the toe by someone else’s football boot,Marley simply bandaged it up. But the injury had sparked the growth of a cancerous melanoma, which
led to cancer spreading throughout his body. In 1980, by which time he was worth around £16m,
he used every ounce of his waning strength to give
what was to be his final performance of classic songs like "No Woman No Cry" and "Buffalo Soldier", in Pennsylvania.
When chemotherapy - which resulted in the loss of
his famous dreadlocks - proved useless, he opted for
a spell at the controversial Bavarian clinic of Dr Josef
Issels, who hoped to stem the cancer through a
vegetarian diet.
But though Marley stayed in Germany for eight
months, nothing could be done to save him. Given
only 48 hours to live, he finally set out to return
home to Jamaica. But he never made it. The film
reveals what even his daughter Cedella did not know:
he suffered a stroke while changing planes in Miami.
That was the real reason he was taken to hospital
there, not the cancer that riddled his body.
His family flew from Jamaica to his bedside. By then
he had barely enough strength to whisper his final
poignant words to his oldest son Ziggy: ‘Money can’t
buy life.’
But the legend was just beginning. When his body
was taken back to his birthplace, thousands came to
pay tribute. The accident of fate that made him
neither black nor white may have driven him to
become a mouthpiece for unity who conquered the
world.

Marley opens tomorrow