I wouldn’t sleep and I took my mind
Lost all knowledge of time and kind
Been dead ——- 400 years (400 years, 400 years)
Wake up, hey (400 years, 400 years)– Jimmy Cliff, “I’ve Been Dead 400 Years” (1977)
Peter Tosh has a new re-lease on life. Praise Jah!
It comes in the form of a children’s picture book — of all things! — just laid down next to the apples in the marketplace, simply titled African. The title comes from a Tosh song Equal Rights, his much-listened-to album from the heady ‘70s, rife with rasta music filling our pink Lefty ears with sugar plum fantasies of universal suffrage and equality, presided over, in joy, by His Majesty Haile Selassie, emissary of Jah on this loamy Earth. Pass da spliff, brudda. Forward and fiaca. Menacle and den gosaca.
The colorful book, illustrated by Rachel Moss, is part of the LyricPop series put out by the hip Brooklyn-based Akashic Books. The series includes (or will include) similar translations of songs like Good Vibrations, Respect, These Boots Are Made For Walkin’, and my anticipated favorite, Where Is My Mind? the Black Francis cult classic. Recently, they even had Samuel L. Jackson pitch in with some sound quarantine advice in the form of an illustrated poem titled, Stay the F— at Home!
Equal Rights (1977) was a follow-up to Tosh’s debut album the year before, the wildly popular Legalize It, which got him instant fame among the undergraduate activist set in America and into all kinds of legal problems back home. Reportedly he was the “victim” of police brutality, and his title song was banned from Jamaican radio, making it even more popular worldwide. Legalize It is part of the fantastic cornucopia of musical wares teeming from 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. Sadly, Tosh died brutally in his own personal 9/11 at home in 1987.
Equal Rights was more in tune with the global vibe at the time to end racism everywhere, arguably, Tosh and Bob Marley leading the way, getting our feet moving to da riddim (sometimes against our will, it seemed). They were engineers on the freedom train that some rastas (and wannabes) argue set in motion, by means of emotion, the collapse of the official Apart-Hate regime in South Africa and the release of Nelson Mandela.
Marley, Tosh and Jimmy Cliff pulled Jamaicans away from the service sector sounds of calypso (Nudda all-shook-up martini, suh? A Black waiter might have said to a sun-tanning Ian Fleming, who wrote some Bond 007 books there) and invited listeners to reconnect with their African 
roots. Beginning in 1600, the Spanish conquistadors began enslaving native Arawaks and virtually drove them to extinction with the introduction of European diseases. The Arawaks were replaced by West Africa slaves. And sugar (and rum!) began its sweet rise on the tooth and palate of Empire back in Britain and the American colony to the north, which would see slavery introduced 19 years later. Hello cotton! If not for cotton, there’d a-been no Che t-shirts to resist The Man with in the ‘80s.
Later, because the Mighty Whitey is so festive, and full of deviant ingenuity, the two commodities were combined and we had a go at eating cotton candy at county fairs. (No, just fucking wid ya.) Sugar went on to become the number one hit of all time — just check out the ingredients list of any food product in America today! (No, I’m not fucking wid ya this time.) Sugar was (and is) the oxycontin of the 17th century.
Equal Rights, following on the huge success of the cult film The Harder They Come in indie and university cinemas across America (good luck seeing the film through ganja smoke — fire code, my ass), galvanized and inspired white do-gooders (or wannabes) to fight back against Ronald Reagan’s new Cold War tactics (remember how giddy we got with the Star Wars program?!) and the trickle-down economics that GWH Bush called “voodoo” — incredibly ironical when he lost re-election and Bill Clinton backroom resident evil James Carville taunted him afterward with, “It’s the economy, stupid!” And then Carville’s boss proceeded to end welfare as we know it. Anyway, Marley, and Tosh got our feet moving, and that’s half the battle when trying to mobilize the masses. Dylan, song-and-dance man that he is, just can’t get our feet moving.
“African” is a wonderful song, and turning it into an appreciation of the African diaspora, for kids, is a cheeky and spectacular idea. Reinforce the notion early that they are a force to be reckoned with in this often-hallucinatory world. If they hear it enough times in childhood, then they’ll be ready for the attitudes later — Miles Davis: “I’m Black alright, they’ll never let me forget. I’m Black alright, I’ll never let them forget it.” And the cousin track from Sly and the Family Stone: “Don’t call me nigger, whitey. Don’t call me whitey, nigger.” On and on and on we go. We should be hugging each other, after Mandela was let loose on the world. But here we are again, all bebopping in Minneapolis, the Mighty Whitey in the White House with the black-chain-link fence implying the victims are terrorists.
Anyway, it’s a lovely song, fit for kids and adults alike, and goes something like this:
Don’t care where you come from,
as long as you’re a black man, you’re an African.
No mind your nationality,
you have got the identity of an African . . .
You will always have integrity, no matter your integument-y. Deep down in my dark white soul, I’d like to think I’m a little African. Rastafari!
Well, it remains to be seen if the song is legitimately effective as a sleeping agent. I guess if you read African as a poem, rather than cheating and playing the rhythm-inducing song off YouTube to the child, s/he may go to sleep — maybe counting Black people jumping fences to escape wolfish officers wearing dark glasses and fascist grins. But, if African is not effective, say your child is cholicy, Akashic Books has another Sam Jackson tale, Go the Fuck to Sleep.
Pass the bong, mon.
