RITA MARLEY. says Ethiopia is Bob Marley's spiritual resting place

The Government yesterday made it clear that it would challenge any request by Rita Marley, the widow of the late Reggae icon Bob Marley, to exhume his remains for reburial in Ethiopia.

"We are willing to challenge it," Education and Culture Minister Maxine Henry-Wilson told the Observer yesterday. "We are not going to just make her pick up herself and go with him."

Rita Marley stirred nationalist emotions and angry debate here and abroad last month when she told journalists in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, that she wanted to remove Bob Marley's remains from his native Nine Miles in St Ann to Shashemene, 250 kilometres (155 miles) south of Addis Ababa where hundreds of Rastafarians have lived since they were given land by Ethiopia's last emperor, Haile Selassie.

HENRY-WILSON. we are not going to just make her pick up herself and go with him

Rastafarians regard Ethiopia as their ancestral home and believe in the divinity of Selassie.

Bob's whole life is about Africa, it is not about Jamaica," the Associated Press reported Rita, who married Marley in 1966, as saying. "Ethiopia is his spiritual resting place."

Yesterday, Henry-Wilson said that for the exhumation to take place, a request would first have to be made from the "properly constituted authority", namely the family and the Marley Estate, and that a final ruling on the matter would have to be made by the courts following a formal request.

So far, the Government has not received a request for the reggae superstar's exhumation, Information Minister Burchell Whiteman said yesterday.

"It is not a simple thing, it is a judicial issue," said Whiteman, who noted that "the country is clearly of a mind that the remains should stay here".

Local newspapers and radio talk shows have been inundated with responses by persons who feel that Marley's remains should remain here.

The trek to his gravesite in St Ann has become a virtual pilgrimage for many Jamaicans, thousands of tourists and fans of the musician who staked his claim as the first Third World superstar, taking reggae to all corners of the earth before his untimely passing in 1981 due to cancer.

On Sunday, thousands of Ethiopians and Rastafarians attended a birthday bash in Addis Ababa commemorating the 60th anniversary of Marley's birth, as part of month-long celebrations in Ethiopia.

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