From 1974 to 1980, Jamaica was rife with political violence. Gangs linked to the country’s two parties, the democratic socialist People’s National Party (PNP) and the conservative Jamaican Labour Party (JLP), were locked in an urban paramilitary conflict that killed, injured, and displaced thousands of people.

In 1978, influenced by the Rastafarian message of unity, gang leaders agreed to peace talks. Out of this process came the One Love Peace Concert in Kingston, which brought together rival gang members, party officials, and the biggest names in reggae, including Bob Marley, who had himself been shot two years prior, most likely by a JLP gunman.

During his performance, Marley summoned onstage the party leaders, prime minister Michael Manley of the PNP and his opponent, Edward Seaga of the JLP, and clasped their hands in a sign of unity. Images of that moment are now iconic, in part because they seem to show Bob Marley as mainstream global culture imagines him: a peacemaker transcending all conflict, including politics.

But that interpretation is far too simple. With his gesture, Bob Marley was not trying to elide the political differences between the left-wing PNP and the right-wing JLP. Rather, he was attempting to rescue the hopes of the social movement that had carried the PNP to power six years earlier – a vision for a new Jamaica that the street violence, which many suspect was the result of a covert CIA destabilisation programme, threatened to destroy.

Africana studies scholar Brian Meeks was in attendance at the April 1978 One Love Peace Concert. Jacobin’s Meagan Day asked Meeks to unpack this iconic photograph, shown above, of Marley embracing Manley and Seaga. In order to properly understand what’s happening in this photo, says Meeks, we need to examine the evolution of Jamaican parties and social movements, the impact of foreign intervention on Jamaica’s prospects for change, and the role of reggae and Rastafari in Jamaican cultural and political life.

Brian Meeks is a professor of Africana studies at Brown University. He has published twelve books and edited collections on Caribbean politics, and he has written about Michael Manley’s democratic socialism for Jacobin. He is also the author of Paint the Town Red, a novel set amid the political violence in Kingston in the 1970s.