My Rasta father showed me the real Jamaica. After he died, I wanted to share it with my kids

05.03.2024 - 08:17 / theguardian.com / Bob Marley

As we bump along terrible roads in my dad’s hot, noisy buttermilk-coloured Beetle, I’m unable to take in the beauty of Jamaica’s north coast – its waterfalls and gin-clear sea, its lush fern-quilted interior and the majestic Blue Mountains my dad loved.

It’s the late 1980s. I’m 15. It’s been nine years since I last saw my dad. To mark our reunion in the country of my birth, my dad, who adored adventures, and wanted my mum, sisters and I to “visit all your people ’dem and see every corner of your beautiful home”, is taking us on a road trip. However, admiring Jamaica’s landscape is the last thing on my mind as I sit squashed between my sisters in the back of the Beetle, angry at my dad because he’d dropped in and out of our childhood. My aim, despite my teenage moodiness, is to get to know him better. Not Jamaica.

A Rasta whose religion required him to be respectful of the Earth, he mostly lived off-grid in the Blue Mountains that cradle Kingston. He grew his own food – from wild thyme, turmeric, scallion and avocado to gungo peas and guava – and, like most Jamaicans, bought from local producers long before sustainability became a buzzword.

I had no idea, as we reconnected during that Beetle holiday, and on many other journeys that followed, that our time would be cut short by his premature death. The visits ranged from a press trip I took to the capital – where my dad met me in the smart-looking hotel lobby and suggested we leave for lunch somewhere “less Babylon”, whisking me off for fried fish at the once-infamous pirate hangout Port Royal – to celebrating the millennium by watching epic Scrabble games being played on the veranda of my grandparents’ Kingston bungalow, and enjoying sweet rum punch and soul-stirring reggae on Negril’s warm white sands.

It’s now 20 years since my dad died. To mark this anniversary, my children, husband and I are doing our own road trip, staying in places with eco credentials and journeying from the sea, where my dad’s ashes were scattered, to the Blue Mountains, where a brass plaque bearing his name sits beneath nine trees we planted in his memory. Jamaica is the only tangible connection my children have to him. So, when we arrive a week before Christmas to traverse the country they love visiting, in a style their grandad would have approved of, and some passengers clap, as is the tradition for those in diaspora returning, or shout, “Jah, give thanks”, my kids beam. Ready to reconnect with their Jamaican selves.

We spend three days in Kingston seeing family and friends, eating flaky patties at Devon House, a grand building erected in 1881 by Jamaica’s first Black millionaire, George Stiebel, and touring Bob Marley’s former home, where we sit on the steps where he wrote