Twenty-five years ago, on the morning of May 11, 1981, reggae legend Bob Marley slipped quietly into death in a Miami hospital room, surrounded by his family. He was 36, the age at which he had prophesied he would die during a conversation with two friends in Delaware in 1969. His final words to his sons were, "On the way up, bring me up," and "Money can't buy life".

Marley. his image is the most ubiquitous of all the past century's rebel heroes

That Marley was a prophet seems undisputed. But that he was far more than that has become increasingly apparent in the quarter-century since his passing. "Everywhere I go in the world today," says the former head of Amnesty International, Jack Healey, "Bob Marley is the symbol of freedom."

For the past 22 years, I have toured the planet with a multimedia presentation called The Life of Bob Marley, witnessing first-hand the profound effect he has had on disparate nations. In between unreleased
film and video clips I tell his life story in places as far apart - spiritually as well as physically - as the bottom of the Grand Canyon and Mount Zion itself in Israel.

After many of these programmes, there always seems to be at least one person who comes up to tell me that "Bob Marley's music literally saved my life." That's because Marley stood for something; his music was filled with moral lessons and gave hope to people who were suffering for no other reason than an accident of birth.

He himself had risen from dire poverty to become the confidant of kings, sought after by those he called 'poli-tricksters,' and others who tried to co-opt his shamanistic charisma. He rejected them all, and it
nearly cost him his life.

In 1976, he, his wife and their manager, were the object of assassins' bullets, escaping death by a hair's breadth. He had had a vision two nights earlier of gunmen coming to kill his mother. She had stood stock still and cheated death. Marley too, froze in position as the shooter fired five bullets into his manager's groin, and aimed a sixth one at the singer's heart. It slashed across his chest and lodged in his left arm, and he carried it to his grave.

Six months earlier, the back cover of his latest album (and his only top 10 charter in America), Rastaman Vibration, carried his public revelation that he believed himself to be the reincarnation of the Biblical Joseph, who fed the children of Israel in the desert for seven years.

This time around, he was destined to feed spiritual food for seven international years of touring before his untimely death. "Joseph is a fruitful bough," wrote Marley quoting the Bible. "The archers have sorely grieved him, and shot at him, and hated him." On that fateful night of December 3, 1976, prophecy fulfilled, and Marley turned from showman to shaman overnight.

Two nights later, he appeared against the advice of his closest friends in an enormous outdoor concert called Smile Jamaica, named after his latest single. Eighty thousand people gathered to hear him sing: one good thing about music\when it hits you feel no pain."

At the end of the lengthy, emotion-filled set, Marley went a cappella, quieting an ad hoc group of some 20 musicians, and sang "If puss and dog can get together, what's wrong with you my brothers, why can't we love one another?" Standing alongside him was his wife Rita, herself a target of the gunmen, wearing a white hospital gown and a bloody bandage on her head, with a bullet still lodged in her skull.

Bob rolled up his sleeve and pointed to the bullet in his arm, opened his jacket to show where it had grazed his heart, then disappeared into an off-island exile of 14 months. The show was arguably the most extraordinary musical event of the 20th century, as the singer and his wife openly defied the gunmen to come back and finish their murderous mission.

The next time he appeared on stage in Jamaica was on April 22, 1978, and he brought the island's two warring political parties' leaders together, making them shake hands in front of 40,000 wildly cheering people. Two months later, he was awarded the United Nations Medal of Peace in New York City, for this and other acts of reconciliation and bravery.

Today, along with Che Guevara, the image of Bob Marley is the most ubiquitous of all the past century's rebel heroes, seen from Aboriginal encampments in Australia, to Hindu outposts in the Himalayas, and on campuses everywhere.

During a speaking tour last January in Israel, we drove for dozens of miles through the territory of the Palestinian Authority in the Jordan River Valley. We eventually reached a border crossing back into Israel, a barren demilitarised zone (DMZ) covered in barbed wire, surrounded by tanks, with guard towers whose guns followed our van's path toward the barrier gate.

A young Israeli guard carrying a machine gun with his finger on the trigger, approached with a scowl. Suddenly he noticed the red, gold and green stickers affixed to our dash-board. He did an enormous double-take, then shouted, "Rastafari!" I asked him if he liked Bob Marley, and he looked at me as if I were absolutely mad. "Of course," he snarled, "Who doesn't?"

Bob Marley remains an ever-growing hero because the shape of the 20th century is now readily seen, and there is simply no musical figure who has attained the status that he has, transcending pop stardom to become a figure at once spiritually iconic (he wrote the "new psalms" according to Neville Garrick, his art director), implicitly political despite his protestations to the contrary, and a moral force of undiminished fervor.

At the millennium, several major events occurred to cement his legacy. Marley was hailed by the New York Times as "the most influential musical figure of the second half of the 20th century". The video of his performance at London's Rainbow Theatre in 1977 was called the epitome of that century's finest musical moments and chosen for inclusion in that newspaper's time capsule to be opened in the year 3000.

The BBC selected Marley's One Love as the anthem of its 24-hour round-the-world millennium tv coverage. Time magazine chose his album Exodus as 'The Album of the Century.' He is also the only third world star enshrined in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Marley had the grace of dying young, and left 11 children to carry on his works. They have done so in a way that must make him very proud, five of them having already won multiple Grammys.

His greatest hits album, Legend, is the second longest running album on Billboard's charts, behind Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon.
I frequently ask my audiences what their favourite Marley track is, and the reply is remarkably consistent. "All of 'em, man. Every one of them!"

Wherever people are in need of solace, of songs of freedom and redemption, the immortal voice of Bob Marley will continue to offer them the "irie ites," or higher heights, of Jah Music, channelled through his peerless poetry and instantly memorable melodies. He is, indeed, an artiste for the ages.

Text and photos by Roger Steffens

Roger Steffens is co-author, with Leroy Jodie Pierson, of Bob Marley and the Wailers: The Definitive Discography (Rounder Books). He is the former co-host of KCRW's Reggae Beat programme.

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