If you take a cursory listen to this track, you may well feel that it’s standard reggae fare - praise be to Haile Selassie and hang in there, Africa, Rastafari dem come to revitalise you one day etc. However, Bone Lies was a topical record about a major news story, one that was fully worth bringing together four such stalwarts as Mutabaruka, Freddie McGregor, Dennis Brown and Cocoa Tea.
In August 1975, a year after he was deposed as the final Emperor of Ethiopia by The Derg, a military junta, and during which time he had been under virtual house arrest, Haile Selassie died at the age of 82. The official word was that he had died of a respiratory condition which had arisen as the result of complications from a medical procedure that had been carried out on his prostate. However, the wider belief was that he had been murdered through forced asphyxiation on the orders of President Mengistu Haile Mariam, who had succeeded Selassie. The funeral was held in extreme secrecy and took place within 24 hours of Selassie’s death. Adding to the sense of suspicion about what had happened to Selassie was the fact that his burial place was not disclosed, only those who dug his grave and lowered his coffin knew where he was buried.
Flash forward to 1992, a year after the Derg were overthrown and when Mengistu, whose disastrous policies had led to the famines so harrowingly chronicled by Michael Buerk in 1984, and who through a reign of terror which would have impressed Pol Pot had killed off thousands of people, went into exile in Zimbabwe. Under a toilet in the grounds of the Imperial Palace, human remains were found which were believed to be those of Selassie. However, there was widespread scepticism among the Rastafarian community that the body was that of their Chosen One and Bone Lies, initially issued as a single on Anchor Records but also recorded for the album, Legit, a three-way collaboration between McGregor, Brown and Cocoa, makes it quite clear that they don’t believe that the bones are those of Selassie. Nevertheless, these were the bones which were finally given a public funeral in November 2000 despite the ongoing convictions of the Rastafarian movement that not only was the body in the coffin not that of Selassie, but that he had not actually died in the first place.
Video courtesy of Chiekh Tidiane NDAO
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