Paul Clammer - Finds His Babylon

Never meet your heroes – even when they’re dead! Jamaica’s cashing in on the legacy of Bob Marley is just one example of ‘hero travel’ gone wrong, as our writer found on a trip to the singer’s birthplace

Few countries are as associated with a single person as Jamaica is w ith Bob Marley. Nearly 40 years after his death, visitors to the island find him everywhere. I’ve had taxis drivers switch their music to Bob Marley when picking up my fare, on the basis that, as a foreigner, I knew no other Jamaican music.

The flattening out of Bob Marley the man into a ‘One Love’ cliché for holidaymakers as well as a brand to be exploited is nowhere more apparent than in Nine Mile, the farming town in the pretty hills of St Ann Parish where he was born and later returned for burial after his untimely death in 1981.

Hustlers mobbed me on arrival, hawking spliffs and space cakes. I was travelling alone, but most visitors avoid the crush by arriving on the Zion Bus, a deliberately rickety, country-style affair painted in Rastafari red, gold and green, with a sound system blasting out the hits on the long drive from the resorts.