Defiant love

PATRICK KARIUKI explores the tumultuous relationship of reggae great Bob Marley and his wife Rita Anderson

"I hate you! I hate you!" screamed Rita Marley at reggae great Bob Marley as he retreated from the dark bedroom.

When Bob’s affairs with other women had become too much for Rita to bear, she moved into her own house away from him. However, he still came to visit her and the children from time to time. In protest at what she viewed as his excessive philandering, she had adopted a policy of denying Bob sex. So on this night, steamed, he broke into her house and forced her to have sex.

She says: "Bob wouldn’t take no for an answer, He said to me: ‘No, you are my wife and you are supposed to’."

Rita and Bob met while still in their teens. However, she was not his first love. In 1962 when he was 17, Bob had met his first love. Her name was Esther.

"She lived in the same yard," recalled Cedella Booker, Bob Marley’s mother.

Unfortunately for the young star-crossed lovers, their relationship had something of the Romeo and Juliet about it; it was not permitted.

In Jamaica, there is a weird sort of joint enterprise between blacks and whites: though they are two segregated cultures that view each other negatively, blacks and whites come together to look down on mulattos (those born of white and black parents).

Turning rebellious

Esther, Bob’s yard-love interest, was pure black. Bob, unfortunately, was born to a white father, Captain Norval Marley, and a black mother, Cedella Booker.

Esther’s older brother stuck his nose in the blooming romance and ordered Esther to break it off with Marley because he didn’t "want no white man screwing up our bloodlines".

Bob’s second-class treatment at the hands of his own society turned him into a rebel. He styled himself a ‘Rude Boy’ and got into fierce street fights, winning many of them.

He also channelled his restless search for belonging into music and became part of a group called the Wailing Wailers, which operated out of the living room of a house in Trench Town, Jamaica. They called it Studio One.

Walking to the studio one day, the Wailers were stopped by a group of three girls led by a pretty Cuban-born girl called Alpharita (Rita) Anderson. The girls did an impromptu song for the Wailers right there by the road. Bob Marley was immediately won over and invited the girls to Studio One to record songs with them as back-up singers. They became the Soulettes.

Bob and Rita were like two peas in a pod. Bob, obviously the leader of his group, was an outstanding singer and Rita, obviously the leader of hers, was a great singer as well. Also, they were both not of pure Jamaican stock — Bob was half English, Rita was born in Cuba.

Their romance blossomed in the studio, aided considerably by the aphrodisiac experience that recording songs can be. However, their attraction — though it grew to be intoxicating and enduring — was not immediate. At least, not by Rita’s reckoning.

"At first I cared for Robbie (Bob) Marley from a sisterly point of view. I saw him and I said: ‘Poor thing!’ It wasn’t: ‘I love him.’ My heart went out to him," she writes in her controversial book No Woman No Cry; My Life with Bob Marley.

One sunny day, however, while they were in the studio, Bob suddenly noticed Rita’s prominent breasts. What happened next changed Rita’s view of the reggae great forever.

Blooming romance

She says: "One day, right in the middle of recording, my breasts started to leak and Bob noticed. He said, a little surprised: ‘What’s that? You have a baby?’"

"Although I was terribly embarrassed," she continues, "I couldn’t deny the evidence, so I just nodded."

Bob’s questions came at her thick and fast like bullets rippling out of an Uzi in the hands of a trained gunman.

"Why you didn’t let us know? Why you didn’t ask to go home early? Is it a boy or girl?"

"Well, it’s a girl," she said.

"Where is she? What is her name? Where is her father? Can I see her?"

Rita still gets mildly hysterical at the memory of this unknown side of the young Bob.

"I looked at him and thought, uh-oh, such a nice guy. And I got weak in the knees. Oh my God, I thought, oh my God."

That evening Bob visited Rita. She brought her baby out, little five-month-old Sharon. According to Rita, the connection of the two was instant.

She writes: "When I brought her out, he loved her. And she loved him. When she learned to talk a little, she couldn’t say ‘Robbie’ so she called him ‘Bahu’."

Afterward, Bob and Rita became nearly inseparable. Bob insisted that Rita end all contact with the baby’s father, with whom she still exchanged letters.

Unlike his crushing experience with Esther just a few months before, everyone was fine with Bob and Rita’s relationship.

At 11am of February 10, 1966, just four days after his 21st birthday, writes Rudolph Okonkwo, Bob Marley walked into the office of the Justice of Peace in Trench Town.

He was wearing a black suit and the fancy shoes that his music producer, Coxsone, bought for him. His bride was wearing a borrowed mother-of-pearl tiara and a white wedding dress made by her aunt.

Just a few hours later, Bob was back at work opening for Michael Jackson and his brothers at the National Stadium in Kingston. Two days later, he left Jamaica for Delaware in the US where he did odd jobs. But he only lasted eight months before returning to Jamaica for good, against his mother’s strenuous objections.

Tough love

They settled in a village called Nine Miles, where Bob was born. It was certainly a period of intense poverty for the couple. Bob had only one pair of underpants, which Rita washed in the evening every day in the water tank outside their house.

However, it was the best time for his creativity, for some of his most memorable songs were written during this peaceful time. And then, about six months later, Bob was introduced to Johnny Nash who signed the Wailers to JAD records.

The rest is history. During the 1970’s, Bob would become an international superstar and a wealthy man.

His relationship with Rita endured, but with many problems. But maybe there’s an explanation. The clichÈ goes that opposites attract. However, when boy and girl are totally similar in every respect, sparks sometimes fly with such a violent passion it is as if high voltage electricity lines have touched.

Bob and Rita certainly shared a tempestuous relationship. There was the time she completely denied him his conjugal rights, but he got them by force.

There was when she showed up at his house with her stuff in the back of a pick-up truck to demand cash for a move to a new house, where she could find peace. The legend gave it to her on the spot; unfortunately, he also had another girl with him.

Rita got into a verbal argument with the girl. Things escalated. Rita called her a whore and then gunned the truck out of there.

In revenge, Rita cheated on Bob and bore the children of two men. But Bob didn’t seem to mind overly. One of the kids — Stephanie Marley — even carries his name.

Sickness and death

In early 1980, Bob Marley fell gravely ill. The cancer in his toe (for which he had refused treatment arguing: "Jah don’t allow no man to be dismantled") had spread upwards through his body to infect his liver, stomach and brain.

On November 4, he was baptised at the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. Five days later, he flew to a controversial treatment centre in Germany with Rita in a last attempt to save his life. They failed.

To the end, he was defiant. Says Rita: "I started to cry and said, ‘Bob, please, don’t leave me’."

"And he looked up and said, "Leave you? Go where? What are you crying for? Forget crying, Rita! Just keep singing. Sing! Sing!"

"If I hear his voice now," she says, "it’s only confirming that he’s always around, everywhere. Because you do really hear his voice wherever you go. All over the world."

On May 11, 1981, the mixed-race Rude Boy, who had risen from the Trench Yard of Kingston to become one of 20th Century’s greatest singers and a spiritual leader to tens of millions around the world, closed his eyes for the last time.

When his soul lifted off and floated gently to Zion, his cancer-wracked body was left lying peacefully in Rita’s arms.

Additional information from Internet sources