Songs of Freedom

In Bob Marley’s 1980 folk ballad Redemption Song, he implores his listeners to:

Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery/

None but ourselves can free our mind.

Marley takes the lyric from fellow Jamaican and pan-Africanist leader Marcus Garvey, who was speaking about the political achievements of the black nationalist movement in America. The black nationalist movement struggled for the emancipation of blacks suffering under white oppression – it was a social and political fight for freedom. But ‘freedom’, ‘emancipation’, ‘nation’, are all laden terms; they mean different things, depending upon the context. Marley, for example, seems to take the objective (‘political’) sense of freedom implied by Garvey in his speech and render it subjective (‘personal’) in his song. Marley had just learned of his cancer prior to writing the song and was in the process of coping with his immanent death.

Earlier this month, we celebrated the birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi. Anyone who knows anything about Gandhi knows that ‘freedom’ for him was not reducible to the objective condition of national self-determination. Self-government, political freedom, could not be equated to good, choice-worthy government, which demanded a great deal more from each of the individuals who comprised the political community, the State and the Nation. It also, perhaps even more importantly, entailed the kind of subjective element expressed in Marley’s verse, Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery...

‘Emancipation’, too, must be thought of as an idea that cannot be limited only to its civic or political sense. As its greatest champion, Karl Marx, had explained: It is doubtless a worthy goal to struggle for political emancipation (civil rights); but we must not lose sight of the wider historical challenge of securing true human emancipation – the freedom of the human person as such.

Here, the distinction is not one between the subjective (personal) and the objective (political), but rather between the political/objective and the absolute (the human as such). It is the absolute, of course, that Bob Marley was evoking through his notion of ‘redemption’: Redemption songs/These songs of freedom/Songs of freedom.

My personal freedom, my community’s freedom, my nation’s freedom, true human freedom: There are struggles, many and varied, to redeem them all. And there are innumerable songs that sing their various stories.

Sometimes a just and righteous fight within one of these theatres of struggle will put us at odds with the others. It usually depends on where we are standing, our social location (what freedoms we already have the privilege to enjoy or what oppressions we have the misfortune to suffer), that determines which freedom struggles we champion and which, instead, we condemn. The ‘upper’ castes, for example, have long excoriated Babasaheb Ambedkar for not having taken an active part in agitating for India’s national self-determination. But for those who long-suffered under the brutal oppression of Brahmanism, Ambedkar was the Freedom Fighter par excellence.

Gandhi, of course, recognised that Ambedkar was dedicated to national service. As he said during his first meeting with Ambedkar: “From the reports that have reached me of your work at the Round Table Conference, I know you are a patriot of sterling worth.”

But Ambedkar, in reply, brushed aside the dominant framework that equated patriotism to the national freedom struggle and reduced all freedom struggles to nationalism: “If in my endeavour to secure human rights for my people, who have been trampled upon in this country for ages, I do any disservice to this country, it would not be a sin.”

Ambedkar saw clearly what we, blinded by our privileges, so often fail to see: There are as many kinds of freedom struggle as there are varieties of bondage. Our circumstances will dictate which ones we must join, and what sacrifices this will entail. Each, in the short term, may bring those other freedom fighters into conflict with our own struggle. But ultimately, all these different freedom movements, like so many songs of freedom, push us forward collectively on the long-wending path to human emancipation.

That is why Bob Marley, facing the end of his life, reposited all of his hope in them:

Won’t you help to sing/These songs of freedom?

Cause all I ever had/Redemption songs.