Redemption Songs tells the extraordinary story of how one of Bob Marley's greatest songs was born in Nova Scotia. It opens with Marley's live acoustic performance of 'Redemption Song' at the end of his life, and reveals that the core lyric comes from a speech Marcus Garvey delivered in Sydney, Nova Scotia, in 1937. The line 'We are going to emancipate ourselves from mental slavery' springboards the reader into the book's ambitions. The author explores why Marley so revered Garvey, and, in doing so, looks at the roots of Rastafarianism and ideas about race. Tattrie argues that to end racism, we must first understand it. He turns to the latest scientific advances in genetics to discover the startling truth that we are all descended from Africans who lived 60,000 years ago, proving that our ideas about race are mostly psychological illusions. The unusual structure of the book challenges ideas about race - and about deep human history - and uses the words of Garvey and Marley to show how we can emancipate ourselves from the mental slavery that is racism.