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Who’s paid us a visit?
8/10/2012
There’s an item published in your newspaper on August 2, 2012, reporting that the Nigerian President, Goodluck Jonathan and his wife were in Port-of Spain for Trinidad & Tobago’s Emancipation Day – part of a ‘flying visit to the Caribbean that will culminate in Jamaica for that country’s 50th Anniversary of Independence celebrations’.
It made me ask the question which you or some of your readers might help with – which African Heads of State have visited Barbados? We know that King Ja-Ja was here, as a prisoner really, for three months in 1891, just before he died. But since then? I don’t think that the Emperor Selassie had arranged Barbados in his 1966 visit which included T&T, Jamaica & Haiti. And I can’t recall visits from Nkrumah (Ghana), Azikiwe (Nigeria), Nyerere (Tanzania), or Nelson Mandela (South Africa).
I know that a group had arranged for Winnie Madikizela-Mandela to be here in 1998, but that was cancelled at the last minute. And among other ‘Africanist’ dignitaries, I don’t think Muhammed Ali, Bob Marley, Malcolm X or Wole Soyinka (the Nigerian Nobel Literature Laureate) came here – though Marcus Garvey (having been refused entry in 1928) was in Barbados very briefly in October 1937 and spoke at the Steel Shed (my mother was present). Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Ture/b Trinidad 1941) was permitted a 24-hour non-speaking entry on May 10, 1970.
I note that Martin Luther King and his wife were officially invited to our Independence Celebrations November 25 – December 2, 1966, and though I assume they were here, I can find no record of that visit.
Farrakhan, however, spoke at Dalkeith Hall sometime in 1980 (not sure of these dates) and of course there was Clement Payne.
I also notice that we now seem to have two ‘simultaneous and contrasting’ sites for the Commemoration of Emancipation – the Bussa Roundabout (with Bussa) and Heroes Square (with Lord Nelson)
Some discussion on the above would be most welcome.
Kamau Brathwaite
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