The One Love Peace Concert: Kingston, 1978
1978 · music
On 22 April 1978 the National Stadium in Kingston was full for a concert that had been arranged as an attempt to stop people being killed. Jamaica had been living through years of street violence between gangs aligned with the two main political parties, and the idea for a musical truce came from within those neighbourhoods. Bob Marley agreed to headline. He had left the country after being shot at his home in 1976 and returned for this.
The line up was the strength of Jamaican music at the time, including Peter Tosh, Dennis Brown, Culture, Big Youth and Jacob Miller. Tosh used his set to speak directly and angrily about the treatment of poor Jamaicans, in front of the politicians sitting in the audience. Marley closed the night, and during the song Jammin he called the prime minister Michael Manley and the opposition leader Edward Seaga onto the stage, took a hand of each and joined them above his head.
The photograph of that moment travelled around the world. The truce it marked did not hold for long, and the violence returned within months, which is part of the honest telling of the story. What the evening did achieve was a public statement, made by musicians rather than politicians, that the killing was not inevitable.
Later that year Marley received a peace medal from a group of nations at the United Nations. The concert remains the best known example of Jamaican music acting directly on Jamaican politics, and the image of two opponents holding hands on a stage in Kingston is still used whenever the question is asked whether music can do anything at all.