Bob Marley Unites Rival Leaders at the One Love Peace Concert

On 22 April 1978, at the National Stadium in Kingston, Jamaica, reggae musician and Rastafari adherent Bob Marley headlined the One Love Peace Concert, organized to calm the island's violent political rivalry between the governing People's National Party and the opposition Jamaica Labour Party, three years after Haile Selassie's death had sparked a crisis of faith for Rastafari in 1975, already recorded here. Sixteen of Jamaica's leading reggae acts performed before more than thirty thousand spectators, and during his own set Marley called Prime Minister Michael Manley and opposition leader Edward Seaga onto the stage during his song Jammin and joined their hands together above his head, a gesture of reconciliation that made the concert, nicknamed the Third World Woodstock, one of the most reproduced images of Rastafari's reach into Jamaican public life. Proceeds funded sanitation and housing for West Kingston's poorest districts, and the concert is still ranked among popular music's most consequential political performances, decades before Jamaica legalized Rastafari's sacramental ganja use in 2015, already recorded here.