NOTES
- Every year, on 21 October, thousands of pilgrims—black, white, mestizo, Cuna (indigenous) Indians—make the trek to Portobelo, a village located on the Caribbean coast of Panama, to pay homage to El Cristo Negro (the Black Christ). Devotees believe that this life-size effigy, which portrays Christ as black, performs miracles. Some claim that this is proof that God places a high value on black people whom he created in his image. The statue has been in Portobelo since the middle of the seventeenth century. How it came to be there remains a mystery. It now stands in the Iglesia de San Felipe, St Phillip's Church, which today continues to function since its construction in 1814.
- In July 1900, Henry Sylvester-Williams, a Trinidadian lawyer, organised in London the first Pan-African meeting of black leaders from the African diaspora who were opposed to colonialism and racism. The meeting drew global attention and the word ‘Pan-African’ was, for the first time, introduced into the lexicon of international affairs.
- George Liele (sometimes spelt ‘Lisle’) came to Jamaica in 1783. He founded the first Baptist church at Windward Road in Kingston. Out of this first church came the East Queen Street and Hanover Street Baptist churches (Clement Gayle, Pioneer Missionary to Jamaica—George Liele [Kingston: Jamaica Baptist Union, 1982]).
- One theory states that Moses Baker was born in New York. Another theory claims that he was of Bahamian origin. He was sometimes referred to as an ‘Afro-European’ who moved to New York where he married Susanna Ashton in September 1778.
- The Baptist Missionary Society was established in 1792, and the first missionaries, William Carey and John Thomas, were sent to Bengal, India in 1793. This was ten years after George Liele began his missionary work in Jamaica.
- Joshua Tinson was the first president of Calabar Theological College which was established near Rio Bueno, Trelawny, in October 1843, for the training of ex-slaves as ministers and teachers.
- The Mico, founded in Kingston in 1835, is now a university college and is said to be the oldest teacher-training institution in the Western Hemisphere and one of the oldest in the world.
- The Jericho Baptist Church near Linstead, St Catherine, Jamaica was founded in 1834.
- Horace Russell, lecture presented at 6th Annual George Liele Lecture, 175th anniversary celebration of the Jericho Baptist Church, St Catherine, Jamaica, n October 2009.
- www.dudleythompson.4t.com
- The house in which Thompson was born was opposite the house of my grandparents.
- The World African Diaspora Union (WADU) is a Pan-African organisation established in 2004 to inspire, unite and empower the African diaspora to play a greater role and a more integral part in the political, cultural and economic development of Africa. Dudley Thompson was president of WADU at the time of his death on 18 January 2012, the day after his ninety-fifth birthday.
- “Communicating Pan-Africanism: Caribbean Leadership and Global Impact”, ed. Hopeton S. Dunn and Rupert Lewis, special issue, Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies 25, no. 4 (December 2011). Critical Arts is a peer-reviewed quarterly journal co-published by Roudedge, UK and Unisa Press, University of South Africa.
- George Padmore's real name was Malcolm Ivan Meredith Nurse.
- According to Emanuel Sarpung Owusu-Ansah, in a feature article in the magazine MG Modern Ghana (26 September 2011), “Some westerners assert that Africa's socioeconomic predicament is attributable to inferior intelligence… The eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher, economist and historian David Hume is quoted… as saying that he is ‘apt to suspect the Negroes to be naturally inferior to the Whites’.” George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) in his Philosophy of History pronounced that “Africa is no historical part of the world” and that Blacks have no “sense of personality; their spirit sleeps, remains sunk in itself, makes no advance, and thus parallels the compact, undifferentiated mass of the African continent” (cited in Sander L. Gilman, On Blackness Without Blacks: Essays on the Image of the Black in Germany [Boston: C.W. Hall, 1982], 94). Some contemporary academics have made similarly outrageous claims: for example, James Watson, a renowned US scientist and a Nobel Prize winner for his part in discovering the structure of DNA, has asserted (in an interview published by the Times of London in October 2007) that “the black brain is naturally incapable of formulating and carrying through effective policies”. The introduction of Eugenics, especially in the USA and Hider's Germany, was a pseudo-scientific attempt to confirm the inferiority of the African.
- Here I will mention just a few cases. Jesse Eugene Russell is an African-American who grew up in very poor circumstances in his home state of Nashville, Tennessee. He did not use his blackness or his humble beginnings, or the terrible experiences of the Middle Passage, as an excuse for the lack of effort or for not taking advantage of the opportunities that came his way. His aim was to strive for excellence regardless of the challenges. The long and short of his story is that he became the inventor of the digital cell phone network and is regarded today as one of the most influential persons in the development of wireless communications. In 1980 and at the age of thirty-two, Russell was selected as one of the most outstanding engineers in the USA. In addition to Jesse Russell's work, it should be noted that the carbon microphone was invented by the African-American Granville T. Wood. He sold the patent to Adam Graham Bell in 1884 as a major component in the development of the telephone. The African-American James West took it further and invented the ‘electret’ (or condenser) microphone currently in use today in some 98 percent of electronic communication devices. West was awarded the National Medal of Technology and is currendy a professor at Johns Hopkins University.
- According to Wikipedia, “Dutty Boukman (Boukman Dutty) (died ca. 1791) was a Jamaican born houngan, or Haitian priest who conducted a religious ceremony in Haiti in which a freedom covenant was affirmed; this ceremony is considered a catalyst to the slave uprising that marked the beginning of the Haitian Revolution. Boukman Dutty was a self educated slave born on the island of Jamaica, his first name on the island means ‘book man’, his last name means ‘dirty’. He was later sold by his British master to a French plantation owner after he attempted to teach other Jamaican slaves to read, who put him to work as a commandeur (slave driver) and, later, a coach driver. His French name came from his English nickname, ‘Book Man’, which some scholars, despite his having been a Vodou houngan, have interpreted as meaning that he was Muslim since even in Africa a Muslim was referred to as a ‘man of the book’.”