‘Ibo’ explains reggae’s liberating role
MICHAEL ‘Ibo’ Cooper, founding member of the reggae band Third World, recently outlined reggae’s role in bringing to the fore injustices
that were being meted out to people of colour.
He was addressing the Ambassadorial Forum on The Role of Reggae Music in the African Liberation Struggle in Pretoria, South Africa, last Tuesday.
“The Ras Tafari movement’s unrelenting African centricity established its influence on the music. Just before the 1970s, the Jamaican government and the higher-income classes had discouraged this African centricity as radicalism and had deported Guyanese born UWI, African history professor Dr Walter Rodney, declaring him persona non grata. The invaluable education that we had received from him especially about Africa before the Middle Eastern and the European arrivals was, by this time, indelible and so the movement energetically surged forward,” Cooper said.
The forum was organised by Jamaica Commission in South Africa to mark Reggae month and to celebrate Jamaica’s 50th Anniversary of Independence.
Cooper said the Ras Tafari movement, which was inspired mainly by Marcus Mosiah Garvey and Haile Selassie I, challenged oppression using musical.
He said the music spawned Alton Ellis’s Going Back To Africa ’cause I’m Black and Jimmy Cliff’s You Can Get It If You Really Want.
“Groups like The Abyssinians, not only took their name from the land of the Negusa Nagast, but as Orthodox Christians wrote their African-centred views, hope for repatriation and gave Amharic cultural information in songs like the anthem Satta Amassa Gana, speaking of the land far away,” Cooper told the audience.
“By the 1970s, the Wailers emerged. The group chanted down a system that was likened to the Babylonian displacement, enslavement and exploitation of the nations of Israel. Their music reflected on ‘400 years’, advising the slave master that the system was to Catch A Fire. The oppressed were encouraged to Get Up, Stand Up for their rights and not to give up on the fight against poverty, for black self-esteem and for human equality towards One Love. The little island’s music was the Small Axe to cut down
the big tree of hatred,” he said.
