Bob Marley's plaque on loan to the Smithsonian

BY BASIL WALTERS Observer staff reporter

Monday, May 17, 2010

THE Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) has created an exhibition honouring musicians who performed at the Apollo Theatre. Included in this exhibition is a plaque loaned to the Smithsonian Institute by the Marley Family.

The plaque, which is on loan to the Smithsonian Institute for the next three years, was given to Bob Marley for selling 100,000 units of the Survival album in Italy.

In addition to the plaque, the display features items from other musicians including Miriam Makeba, Afrika Bambaataa and Mongo Santamaria. After the Smithsonian display ends, the Apollo exhibit will travel to the Charles H Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit and then the Museum of the City of New York. The plan is to have the plaque at the Bob Marley Museum in Jamaica upon its return from the Smithsonian.

This latest laudatory acknowledgement of Bob Marley's global significance has been a street in Nigeria being named after him in January of this year in celebrations of its 48th year of independence.

Marley has been placed in the company of Marcus Garvey, Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti and sport heroes Jay Jay Okocha, Kanu Nwankwo and Mary Onyali, all of whom have streets in Nigeria with their names.

It is also understood that the film, Africa Unite, is having a premiere at the Real Life Pan-African Documentary Film Festival being held in Ghana from May 16 - 20.

Africa Unite has been rated a masterfully executed film by Stephanie Black that is at once a concert tribute, the Marley family travelogue, and humanitarian documentary, igniting the screen with the spirit of the world-renowned reggae icon.

One of the founders of the festival, Awam Amkpa, who is also a professor of Drama and Film at the New York University in the USA, is reported to have said that the festival was to inspire Africans to document their own histories while exchanging film vocabularies, methods and contexts with film-makers from other continents.

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Bob Marley's plaque on loan to the Smithsonian