Jamaican National Reggae Music Archive Robbed !!

One of the country's most important music collections, including original recordings by Bob Marley and Pete Tosh, had been ransacked.

Thousands of vinyl records and CDs had gone.

Nearly one year on not a single record has been recovered, but officials are hoping an appeal to music fans will help replace the collection built up over the years by the JBC.
Created in 1961 at the end of the colonial era, the JBC followed a model very similar to the BBC: a public service to inform, educate and entertain.

The radio station was there at the birth of Jamaica's music business when all kinds of music burst forth on the Caribbean island.

Its music library had everything from mento to ska, and from rocksteady to reggae.

What is left of the archive has been moved to a new more secure location.

"It's a national disgrace, we've really thrown away or let people take what was not their own, but somehow they had access to it and all that history is lost," says Gladstone Wilson, the former programme manager at JBC.

Despite the public call for people to come forward with information, so far there have been no leads.
"There's a culture of complicity," says Carolyn Cooper, a professor of literary and cultural studies at the University of the West Indies.

"People need social responsibility to say; alright, yes, I know who stole the stuff but because its so important I'm prepared to risk telling the police."

Hopes of rebuilding what was the most comprehensive music collection in Jamaica may rest on artists and collectors helping to create a new archive.


The Reggae News Agency

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