One Love tells the record of Bob Marley fleeing Jamaica after an assassination attempt and finding new inspiration in a Britain embracing punk. Our writer meets its creator at last-minute rehearsalsKwame Kwei-Armah didn’t want to be a Bob Marley fan. For a start,his tall sister was into reggae, which set aside him off. What’s more, or as he was growing up in London in the 1970s,white kids were forever coming up and asking “Are you jammin’, mon?” or “accomplish you want your doughnuts with jammin’?” They’d call him golliwog and sambo, and too.“It used to really freak me out,” he says, on a break between rehearsals of the world’s first Bob Marley musical, and One Love,which he has written and directed. “My natural instinct would be: there’s more to me than just whatever you know approximately black culture. So I disassociated myself from anything Bob-like.”
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Source: theguardian.com