When I started using the Internet in the early 2010s, I was infatuated with Bob Marley. It was a time of innocence and spurred by the access to mobile devices, I was drawn to the Jamaican singer’s music: soulful, lifting. I was barely fifteen but I knew the music I liked, and natural curiosity led me on, past the vibrating field of sonics and towards the still, dreamlike quality of visuals. YouTube was the tool and night was the accomplice. And when the great machinery of the world whirled down, I would subscribe to cheap mobile data plans and watch videos, and more videos, all on Marley and his music.
Familiarity was relatively easy. From my younger years, the sunny and cool rhythms I associated with reggae were established through two musicians: one of them was Lucky Dube, whose clairvoyant perspective and hurt-drenched voice made him ever-present, always booming from someone’s speakers in that middleclass neighborhood on the outskirts of Ajegunle. The other artist we associated with the genre was Bob Marley, whose presence was more visual than sonic. One felt Marley through posters and memorabilia, random objects that varied from bus windows to children’s colouring books, where his face was printed on. A popular image casts him in a sunset-streaked glow, face sideways, the brightest smile.
Amplifying the image are Marley’s sturdy dreadlocks. Long, it ran concurrent to his footballer’s shoulders. It also seemed to have a life of its own; something about the imagery. In the videos I found online, the singer would hold his guitar, as though it was a rocking baby. With each gentle sway would come the swing of those locs, thick-formed and glorious.
Natty Dread
After Bob Marley and The Wailers—which consisted of Bunny Wailer and Peter Tosh—broke up in 1974, Marley, who was the group’s suave frontman, released Natty Dread. The 42-minutes long album is bonier, less sentimental, than the earlier works. “Lively Up Yourself,” the opening record, reflects enough colour with its saxophone solo but there’s decidedly no spurts and brazen movement. Even “No Woman, No Cry,” its version here, utilises a stringent guitar base and fast-paced drum pattern—quite different from the folkloric flourishes of its most popular, slower version.
On Natty Dread, Marley was visibly leaning into the tougher aspect of his personality. He was turning more strongly onto the militant ideals of Rastafarianism, which he’d been initiated into earlier on, by Mortimo Planno. The dreadlocks were a manifestation of that philosophy, and here he took it further through the choice of the title. This worked, but only partially, since the album is hardly considered among his strongest. Perhaps there was the pressure of being a newly-minted solo star, and it’s one we can’t help but hear in the music.
But that would be a simplistic reading, for in Natty Dread, one also hears Marley working his way out of the acceptable pop star image he’d curated before then. He was singing in more traditional patois and was writing rhythmically, rather than structurally, as he previously did. In the search for his new self, it seemed as though Marley had to “roughen” up his dreads, to scatter them in intense contemplation, so that when one beholds their new appearance, it would likely come with profound realisation.
Revelations
When one is fourteen, they tend to open themselves up to influences. At the right time, in the right circumstances, longtime interests can stick during this period in one’s life. Due to the intellectual rewards and curiosity hip-hop had fostered in me, it was normal that I continued to search for other obsessions. Quaint, niche interests were my forte at the time and when reggae—through the interesting character of Ikechukwu—came to my doorstep, I followed; first with my heart, and later with my ears, and finally with my eyes.
Ikechukwu was one of a kind; too strange for normal eyes. We all struggled to understand him, this teenager who saved his feeding money at school, starving with glee, just to buy reggae mixtapes. The green-red-yellow panafrican design of the paperbacks would glisten when he revealed them from underneath his blue-striped uniform. Bewildered classmates would stare at him as he talked about each of the artists on the mixtape: Marley, Tosh, Dube, the usual suspects; Jimmy Cliff, Culture, Eric Donaldson, Burning Spear, Alpha Blondy. Bright notes pouring from his throat, he blended autobiography and performance. Ikechukwu liked performing Dube, leaving me awestruck.
How could a young person have such soul? In coveting the intricate religiosity behind reggae music, I sought to touch its soft centre; as Damon Galgut wrote in one of his novels, I wanted to move closer to the lush heart of things. Perhaps that was the beginning of my longing for the dreadlock rasta—in-tune with Africa, an enlightened youngster, the cool smoker who spoke the ways of women as passionately as he did politics. Around us in Ajegunle, one could still see, even if waning, vestiges of the ragga culture that bloomed in the nineties in that multicultural fauna of Lagos.
In sound, Niger Delta sensibilities were the biggest influencers, but the visual identity was much influenced by Jamaica and its ownership of the reggae culture. A studio in Sufianu Street named Jahoha had murals of reggae superstars on its wall, which also led towards the staircase of a storey building; the studio, a small space on the ground floor. When visiting my friend who lived there, I would see musicians hanging around that space, sometimes smoking or rolling a blunt, but always immersed, somewhat spiritually, in that very moment: it was visible in the relaxed and focused poise of their facial features. It was an interesting thing to notice, even as other people, much older, who passed by, seemed to regard them nonchalantly.
One memory has never left me, since it happened all those years ago. I was walking with a friend to his house. The street that led there was on the other side of People’s Bridge, a deceptively sturdy wooden structure which went across a canal. It was afternoon. Pigs lolled in the muck of thick, unflowing water, grunting in satisfaction every now and then. The hot air lazily lifted things off the ground, the uneven ground, a clutter made of solidified waste matter. Some churches along the street were in service. Their songs hung in the air. But as we walked deeper into the street, it got quiet. And then we saw him; a lunatic, or so we thought. His hair had formed into deep brown, almost becoming ginger, and his fingers were crusty and his beard ragged. History seemed to linger behind his now-lucid eyes as he beheld us approaching. Urged by my friend, who knew my infatuation with all things dreadlocked, I said a greeting in the patois I was then learning. And he replied, grunting, a smile dancing in his eyes.
Wanted Dread and Alive
In 1981, Peter Tosh was seven years into his solo career. A prolific artist, he’d released four albums before and all of them—Legalize It, Equal Rights, Bush Doctor, Mystic Man—constructed his tough persona. I suggest “tough” because Tosh only touched the theme that most mattered to him, which was freedom. If there was something tough about how he came across, it is because others (read: the establishment) would rather have him soften his philosophy. He refused to play that game of selling out.
This refusal would mean that Tosh was subtly persecuted. Or, not so subtly, especially after Jamaica’s One Love Peace Concert in 1978, where he smoked on stage and criticised the attending politicians, Michael Manley and Edward Seagal, for failing to effect marijuana legalisation. For a while, this resistant philosophy was the sole imagery I associated with Tosh; an oversight on my part, because earlier this year the need to gauge the music on its own terms arose, to borrow Teju Cole’s image, like a whale suddenly coming up for air.
Wanted Dread and Alive was my introduction to the man. Maybe the implicit motivation is that I now have dreads. But when I opened Tosh’s page on Spotify and saw his intriguing covers, it was the relatively less-fancy sepia tone of this one that called out to me. The musician’s dreadlocks are centrally displayed, with a design that recalls the old Western-styled “wanted” posters. The word WANTED is tellingly capitalised, and emblazoned above his head. His gaze is stoic, focused. He’s in the business of getting things done.
Tosh knew how to get things done, but he wasn’t merely about the end result. He was a man who understood process. Every song built upon an established mood, propelling narrative rather than stifling it. The narrative was the same as Tosh always sang: we ought to become better versions of ourselves. To realise the depth of his subject, he had to be realist: “The Poor Man Feel It” gleams with stark consideration and the upbeat production does not necessarily eclipse the purpose. He sings for the potential betrayal of friends, charting the intimate with the bigger questions. Tosh’s existence was a big question: are you going to sit down and be kicked? Get up, he sings, stand up, he says: fight for your life. And Wanted Dread and Alive, even with an eye on fatalism, extols the virtue of alive-ness, which is the tough decision to honour the process of life.
If Marley was reflected as the heart of reggae, the one who sang softly for its hard existence to be embraced, then Tosh is the soul. He had enough heart, but even crucially, he wasn’t afraid of rejecting appeal. Listen close and you’ll hear the heart beat. But how does one perceive the soul?
Genesis
Growing up, my father, like many fathers of his generation, wanted me to keep a low cut. Although he wasn’t like others who went to extreme lengths to effect this, the threat was always present, particularly because he touched the back of his hand when giving us money for the cut: he wanted it to be that smooth. I think his logic was that he knew my elder brother and I would try anyway to reflect our autonomy through our haircuts. Only through his warning could we apply some commonsense while at it.
And truly, that was the case. We kept our hair low, only a small patch visible. Returning from the barbershop, with powder lining the edges, we would meet him outside with his friends, or indoors, and after checking the level of the cut, we got his approval if it was low enough. If it wasn’t, we got scolded, sometimes a knock, but he seldom sent us back to the barbershop, for which we were grateful: in those days that was the most cruel punishment—being swaggering, gallivanting boys, we wanted to be anything but boys, and being sent back to get one’s hair cut lower was quite consequential to that vision of assured, or at least approaching, maturity.
In junior secondary school, thirteen or fourteen at the time, the edges of my hairline started reclining, forming a sort of U shape. My hair was otherwise full, so this was a thing of great confusion, but I tried not to pay much mind to it. Barbers tried as well to shave it into coherence, but the more they tried, the more those edges, directly above my ears, seemed to deepen even further. In the end they’d use powder as though it was a magic formula. Nothing worked, so I just got around to having my hair like that.
Discourse about hair has always lingered around greater motivation, with the African American race theory pointing out that social and political history influences the hairstyles black people have kept over the years. In Alex Haley’s autobiography of Malcolm X, the Civil Rights leader, X, spoke about how he went through the painful style of “conking” his hair, essentially stripping its melanin toughness so that it could become slick, straight, like the hair of white people. Only when he entered his true purpose as a black leader, only then could he see how deeply he’d fallen into rot.
The African discourse on hair has similar undercurrents, since low cut styles were implicitly left by the British as representing decency. In schools, churches, workplaces, almost everywhere across the continent, full hair is frowned upon, considered an eccentricity that no one really needs. The EndSARS movement in Nigeria was largely propelled by young people, who knew too well the blatant discrimination and profiling that comes with having full hair, let alone dreadlocks. Speak too confidently and you are labelled a fraudster; don’t speak at all, and the police authorities would take that for guilt. And sometimes there have been reports of an adult person’s hair being cut in the street, under forceful supervision.
Having dreadlocks in such a time poses quite the risk. I can’t count the number of times my mother has asked me to “walk safely,” just because of my hairstyle. She knows her last child well; he tries to abide by rightfulness, but in the wider context of oppression and subjugation, in the context of the world Tosh and Marley painted from different perspectives, there’s no sure reward for living right. Ironically, that could even be the reason why calamity befalls a person.
But, I can’t stop living this one wild life. When walking through the streets and the wind ruffles through my hair, my dreadlocked hair, it feels like a letter from the universe. With a mind full of joy and heart stuffed with satisfaction, I carefully unwrap the flap of the letter, and it’s one that I hope I will be reading for a long time. It says: you are here now; you are loved.♦
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Emmanuel Esomnofu is a Nigerian writer and culture journalist. He was awarded Best Writer of 2024 by The Republic and was named among the ‘30 Under 30 Power Players in Nigerian Music’ by Turntable. Esomnofu currently writes on popular culture for OkayAfrica and is working on his debut manuscript.