BOB MARLEY
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Bob Marley was born in the village of Nine Mile in Saint Ann Parish, Jamaica as Nesta Robert Marley. A Jamaican passport official would later swap his first and middle names.He is of Mixed Race. His father, Norval Sinclair Marley, was a White English-Jamaican of mixed English and Syrian-Jewish descent,whose family came from Sussex, England. Norval claimed to have been a captain in the Royal Marines,and was a plantation overseer, when he married Cedella Booker, an Afro-Jamaican then 18 years old.
Norval provided financial support for his wife and child, but seldom saw them, as he was often away on trips. In 1955, when Bob Marley was 10 years old, his father died of a heart attack at age 70.
Marley faced questions about his own racial
identity throughout his life. He once reflected:
don't have prejudice against meself. My father was a white and my mother was black. Them call me half-caste or whatever. Me don't deh pon nobody's side. Me don't deh pon the black man's side nor the white man's side. Me deh pon God's side, the one who create me and cause me to come from black and white.
The Bob Marley House in Nine Mile is a home that he shared with his mother during his youth