My “saintly person” is Bob Marley. His full name was Robert “Bob” Nesta Marley. He was actually named Nesta Robert Marley when he was born but a Jamaican Passport official accidently mixed up his names. He was born on February 6,1945 in the village of Nine Mile in Saint Ann Parish, Jamaica. In 1977 he was diagnosed with having a type of skin cancer under one of toe nails. He refused to have his toe amputated. He died on May 11, 1981 after the cancer had spread to his lungs and brain.
Bob Marley was very poor growing up. He started singing in his teens. He quit school at age 14 and started working as a welder’s apprentice when his mom found him the job. He ended up getting a steel splinter in his eye after not very long and quit the job to pursue a music career full time. In 1963 he formed a band with a few friends called Bob Marley and the Wailers. They wrote songs about Jamaica’s poor and began to be a big influence on the youth of Jamaica. In 1966, Bob began to slowly adopt the Rastafarian way of life and began wearing his hair in dreadlocks. Rastafari was a religion based on the teachings of Marcus Garvey. Garvey said that Africans should worship a god of their own image like the God of Ethiopia. Rastafari’s beliefs were also based on The Holy Piby or The Black Man’s Bible. He urged his people to know their history so it wouldn’t be repeated again. Before Bob Marley, Rastafari beliefs were only referenced once in a while by Jamaican musicians. Bob Marley and the Wailers were responsible for introducing Rastafari to the world by using lyrics in their songs that came from the Holy Piby.
Bob Marley is probably most famous for wearing dreadlocks and red green and gold, the colors of the Ethiopian flag. His song “One Love” was declared the song of the millennium by the BBC. Since 1984, it sells over 250,000 copies a year. Bob provided a service to the world because his lyrics gave a voice to the poor, to the people suffering from racial