How Jamaica Inspired Writers, Artistes and Even Boxers!
SADE is the British Nigerian singer, songwriter, composer, and record producer. She moved to Jamaica in the late 1990s and had a relationship with music producer Bob Morgan. She has a daughter for him, but they later separated. (pictured in red dress).
MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. visited Jamaica every year during the 1960s. He wrote many of speeches while he was on the island. He saw the freedom he was fighting for in the US in action in Jamaica, a politically independent majority Black country. Dr King was so comfortable in Jamaica every year, he rented a house and completed the manuscript which became his most important book: Where Do We Go From Here. (pictured top right).
“James Bond”, one of the most popular characters to emerge out of the postwar wreckage of Europe, was born in Jamaica. Author IAN FLEMING (1946 – 1964) vowed that after the war that he would build a house in Jamaica. He had visited the country briefly for a U boat conference during the war and had fallen in love with it. So in 1946 he acquired 15 acres of land on an old donkey racecourse above a little cove with a coral reef. (pictured bottom right)
“I wrote every one of the Bond thrillers here with the jalousies closed around me so that I would not be distracted by the birds and the flowers and the sunshine outside… Would these books have been born if I had not been living in the gorgeous vacuum of a Jamaican holiday? I doubt it,” Ian Fleming said. (Pictured bottom right)
World heavyweight boxing champion MUHAMMAD ALI was presented with the key to city of Kingston in December 1974. Ali and a Nation of Islam delegates were invited by then Promie Minister Michael Manley. Manley said to Ali: “Your fist might have put you in everybody’s favour…but it is your conscience that has written you into the immortality in the hostry of human affairs.” Profound words, Michael! . – (centre picture)
ZORA NEALE HURSTON was an American folklorist, anthropologist, and author. She is best known for her 1937 novel “Their Eyes Were Watching God”. “Tell My Horse” is Zora Neale Hurston’s account of her anthropological fieldwork in Jamaica and Haiti in 1936-37. In April 1936, Hurston traveled to Kingston to study the Maroons, She lived with them for around six months. Afterwards, she visited Haiti.
In her book she writes: “Jamaica… has something else besides its mountains of majesty and its quick, green valleys… Jamaica has its “bush.” That is, the island has more usable plants for medicinal and edible purposes than any other spot on earth..”. (pictured top left)
By Neo Makeba
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