Bob Marley Receives a Jamaican State Funeral

On 21 May 1981, ten days after Bob Marley died of cancer in Miami, the Jamaican government gave him a state funeral, three years after he had united rival political leaders on stage at the One Love Peace Concert in 1978, already recorded here, and thirty four years before Jamaica legalized Rastafari sacramental ganja use in 2015, also recorded here. Weeks earlier the government of Prime Minister Edward Seaga had conferred on Marley the Order of Merit, Jamaica's third highest national honor; he died before it could be presented. His body lay in state at Kingston's National Arena on 20 and 21 May, drawing a crowd the National Library of Jamaica's own photograph archive records police at the time called the largest gathering ever seen in Jamaica, larger than the funeral of National Hero Alexander Bustamante. A service at the Ethiopian Orthodox Church of the Holy Trinity on Maxfield Avenue preceded the main ceremony at the Arena, where Governor General Sir Florizel Glasspole and former Prime Minister Michael Manley joined Seaga, who delivered the eulogy himself and closed it, 'May his soul rest in the arms of Jah Rastafari,' naming Marley's faith explicitly at a ceremony the Jamaican state itself conducted. The casket, draped in the Jamaican and Ethiopian flags, carried his red Gibson Les Paul guitar, a Bible opened to Psalm 23 and ganja; he was buried the same day at Nine Mile, St Ann, where he had been born thirty six years before.