Mortimer Planno

Mortimo St George "Kumi" Planno, (6 September 1929, Cuba – 5 March 2006,[1] Kingston, Jamaica) was a Rastafari elder, drummer and a follower of the back-to-Africa movement founded in the 1910s by Marcus Garvey.

He is best known as the Rasta teacher and friend of Bob Marley, and as the man who commanded the respect of a chaotic crowd during the arrival of Emperor Haile Selassie on his visit to Jamaica in 1966.

After repeated harassment by the authorities and ostracism by the Christian public, Planno and his colleagues approached the University College of the West Indies to request an official study of the Rastafari movement, in an effort to establish a better relationship with the wider Jamaican society.

The Jamaican government had decided to send a delegation of both officials and Rastafari leaders to Addis Ababa to meet Emperor Haile Selassie.

The Rastafarian elder lived in the same neighborhood as the vocal group on 35 Fifth Street in West Kingston's Trench Town ghetto, where he kept a library of books on Black Power and Ethiopian history.

These two rare, vintage tracks were briefly reissued in 2003 by reggae historian Bruno Blum on the Bob Marley four-CD set Rebel (JAD Records).