Prime Minister Damian Marley? The youngest son of Bob Marley says he is contemplating entering Jamaican politics:
It’s not the question of do I want to get into politics; it’s how do I help people, and I think increasingly, that in order to do certain things, you have to be involved somehow. The issues of inequality are still there. They aren’t unique issues to Jamaica, but they haven’t been dealt with.
When Damian was born in 1979, the youngest of 11 of his father’s children, it would have been impossible for a Rastaman to run for office but times and attitudes are changing. His father was born poor in the hills of Nine Mile and rose to worldwide prominence and a mother, Cindy Breakspeare, that was the reining Miss World of 1976, taking the crown in London in an era when beauty queens usually did not come from the colonies. With this lineage, no wonder Jr. Gong considers the sky as the limit.
He says the first thing he would do as prime minister is to push forward the latent decriminalization of marijuana and make the herb fully legalized.
Then he would address the issue of reparations. While his father famously spoke of “mental slavery,” Damian wants Jamaica’s former colonial masters to pay for their part in native genocide and African enslavement.
