# The Trench Town Origin *A Biography of Bob Marley* — Legendary Biographies No. 170 - **Subject:** Robert Nesta Marley - **Written by:** Sandile Mokoena - **Shelf:** Music / World - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 223 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **Paperback:** $19.99 — 6 × 9 in · 223 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-135-2) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Imogen Vey (ISBN 979-8-90623-217-5) Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/170-the-trench-town-origin.html ## About this book He was born Robert Nesta Marley on February 6, 1945, in Nine Mile, Saint Ann Parish, Jamaica, the son of a Jamaican-born British-Army-quartermaster father named Norval Marley and a young Black Jamaican mother named Cedella Booker. He met Bunny Wailer in primary school and Peter Tosh at the singer Joe Higgs's vocal-coaching sessions on Studio One Lane in Kingston in 1963. The Wailers formed that year. They recorded Simmer Down in February 1964 — their first Jamaican number one. Catch a Fire came out on Island Records in 1973 — the first international reggae album. He survived an assassination attempt at his Hope Road home in Kingston on December 3, 1976, two days before the Smile Jamaica concert. He died of metastatic melanoma at the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Miami on May 11, 1981, at thirty-six. Sandile Mokoena's biography opens earlier and follows the arc through the Nine Mile childhood and the long Trench Town years, the Studio One sessions with Coxsone Dodd, the 1966 Cedella Booker emigration to Wilmington, Delaware, the 1966 marriage to Rita Anderson, the 1967 Rastafari conversion, the Wailers Island years and the long Chris Blackwell collaboration, the Burnin' and Natty Dread and Rastaman Vibration albums, the 1976 Hope Road shooting and the 1978 One Love Peace Concert at the National Stadium, the 1980 Madison Square Garden collapse, the long Bavarian Cancer Centre treatment, the May 11 Miami death, and the long Tuff Gong recording studio infrastructure his family has continued. What emerges is a portrait of the Jamaican Rasta singer whose ten Wailers and solo studio albums made reggae the most consequential post-1970 export of the global South — and whose body the cancer killed at thirty-six. ## Contents 1. The Captain's Son 2. Trenchtown 3. The Wailers 4. Rita 5. Rastafari 6. Island Records 7. Natty Dread 8. Smile Jamaica 9. Exodus 10. The Peace Concert 11. Kaya 12. Zimbabwe 13. The Toe 14. Uprising 15. The Tour 16. Bavaria 17. The Flight Home 18. Redemption Song 19. One Love ## Questions **Who is The Trench Town Origin about?** Robert Nesta Marley. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Trench Town Origin — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 4,536 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 64,000 words, 19 chapters, 223 pages in the paperback. **What is the printed book like?** 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf. ## The writer Sandile Mokoena is a Johannesburg-based journalist whose biography of Steve Biko was a finalist for the 2024 Alan Paton Award. He writes about southern African political and musical figures with the patience of an oral historian. His long-form profile work includes the books Room 619, The Estadio Chile, The Thirty-Year Exile, and The Trench Town Origin. Each narrative relies on extensive archival research and direct interviews with living witnesses to reconstruct complex twentieth-century histories. He lives in the suburb of Melville, Johannesburg, where he collects vinyl records and works as a freelance newspaper contributor.