Heart of the Marleys Part 2

Heart of the Marleys BY MICHAEL MCKNIGHT Neither Rohan nor his Grammy-winning brothers Ziggy, -Stephen and Damian (16 statuettes among them) nor Bob Marley’s four other sons are likely to admit it, but it’s not easy being the great reggae singer’s child. Their father, who died of melanoma in 1981 at 36, is one of the few men whose faces are as recognizable in Tokyo as in Timbuktu or Reykjavík. He’s also an international symbol of freedom, human rights and self-determination. ​Oh, being Bob Marley’s son can be fun when you’re young and playing football at Miami, but as your 30s creep closer and you haven’t done much else, you can become known as what Jamaicans call a licky-licky -- a freeloader. Since he was 18, Rohan has known that the Marley money is his safety net and, in ways, his burden. It can make it hard to be a dad, because lessons about work ethic and education are not easy to impart when you don’t have a degree and -- aside from a partial season in the CFL -- you’ve never been, you know, employed. In 1999, five years after his Hurricanes career ended, Rohan was living in New York City with R&B star Lauryn Hill. He was working security for his brothers during their concert tour when he received a windfall from his father’s estate in the low six figures, the kind of good fortune that befalls Marley’s offspring less often than you might think for an artist whose Legend album still ranks in the Billboard top 100 30 years after its release. At the time, Rohan had four children aged five or younger: two with Hill (they would have three more together) and two with his ex-wife, Geraldine Khawly, whom he met when they were students at Miami’s Palmetto High. With his kids in mind, Rohan decided to invest in something that, if it couldn’t be as magical as his dad’s music, might at least have its staying power. During a hike that year with some trusted Rasta brethren in a barely accessible stretch of mountainside in Portland Parish, Rohan found that something. “Trees dropped star apples at my feet,” he recalls. “An old house appeared out of the mist. You could hear a river rumblin’ but you could nah see it. I was like, Was there a farm here at some point?” It looked as if no one had been there in 200 years. “Seeing what I was seeing, hearing the river, I thought it was a dream,” Marley says. The dream stretched for 52 acres. “This coffee country,” one of his companions said matter-of-factly. That land is not only a farm once again, but it is also the hub of a $5.6 million–per–year business (“sustainably grown, ethically farmed and artisan -- roasted-gourmet coffee,” according to marleycoffee.com) that harvests its beans in Jamaica, Ethiopia, Guatemala and Papua New Guinea and sells them in retail outlets as far-flung as Chile, Germany and Japan. Sales are so robust that Rohan’s cousin Warren Marley, 42, sitting on a stump puffing another indigenous crop, says that the company’s biggest challenge is “supply meeting demand." www.ganolifevo.com/ganoforlifeusa