The BBC’s African Perspective programme is investigating what life is like for some of an estimated 20 million Africans who live in the diaspora.

Nick Davis in Kingston finds out what made some Africans voluntarily make the former slave island of Jamaica their home.

Christopher Columbus landed on the beach at Rio Bueno on Jamaica’s north coast in 1494 and forever changed the history of this island.

The Spanish arrived and brought the Africans with them. They imported slaves throughout their 160-year stay and the practice continued under British rule.

Some of my students sometimes don’t seem very proud to be called African, they associate the place with poverty, starvation — Anthropologist Barry Chevannes, University of the West Indies

Jamaica’s national motto is “Out of many, one people” - a description of the island’s multi-ethnic background.

But with over 90% of the 2.6m population being black, the country looks African.

But does it feel African?

“It looked like home to me when I first arrived. Sometimes I’d make a mistake and speak to people in my Ghanaian language and then I’d suddenly realise, this isn’t a Ghana,” says Sophie Dawes who grew up in what was formerly called the Gold Coast, now Ghana.

‘Jamaica heads, Nigeria tails’

The 74-year-old grandmother met her husband - a well known Jamaican academic and writer, Neville Dawes - when she was at university in Ghana. They eventually moved to the West Indies with their young family more than 40 years ago.

Nigerian Olalekan Abbass — We basically tossed a coin and said where do we go? Jamaica heads, Nigeria tails Nigerian Olalekan Abbass

For Olalekan Abbass who came from Abelkuta in Nigeria’s Ogun state it was a similar story.

He met and married his wife Arlene, who is Jamaican, in London but they had a dilemma.

“We basically tossed a coin and said where do we go? Jamaica heads, Nigeria tails.

It was heads and we came down.”

Jamaicans have a strong connection with Africa.

The look to the motherland started in the years of slavery. Traditions, rituals, religious beliefs and even language were all reinforced by the waves of Africans shipped in to keep the island’s sugar plantations going.

But after emancipation, it was not really until Marcus Garvey during the 1920s and 1930s that an island with wider black consciousness took hold.

He told his supporters to “look to Africa“, and his message and his calls for repatriation were taken up by descendants of African slaves and became the cornerstone of a new religion, Rastafari.

Miles away

“I was in college in America and whilst studying I became friends with a good brother, he would say to me why are you acting Jamaican, but I would say to him, why are you acting like an African?” says Makonnen who came from Guinea Bisseau and is a follower of Rastafari.

Makonnen’s dreadlocks are covered under a wicker hat.

He is always well dressed but this is a special day. He is in a silk shirt.

The face of Ethiopia’s Emperor, Haile Selassie is proudly emblazoned across it.

Today would’ve been the 116th birthday of His Imperial Majesty - the most important date for Rastafarians.

He works as a herbalist and a counsellor out of a health food store in Ocho Rios, a busy resort town on Jamaica’s north coast but he has taken some time off to show me what reminds him most of home.

We head to a little fishing village. As we arrive the boats are heading back from sea. A scene that Makonnen says is repeated thousands of miles away in Africa.

Shared love of food

African and Caribbean people share a love of food

“The whole scenario here is about the fisherman - they go out in these little locally made boats, they bring in the catch and it has been cleaned.

“The way the huts are built, look it’s just like Africa. They cook the sweetest seafood right here and down the road they turn cornmeal into what we call fufu.”

A love of food is something that both African and Caribbean people share. And for the people who have made Jamaica home, many of the dishes are not that foreign.

“The food is very similar to what we eat in Nigeria. There’s a little difference in how it’s prepared but it’s so close; the ingredients are the same. I went to the doctor the other day he said you need to change your diet.

“I said change it to what? Everything they have here is the same as what we eat back home,” says Nigerian Olalaken Abass.

“Nigerians talk about nyam - to eat, and Jamaicans say the same word in Patois [Jamaican creole language] so there’s lot of similarities in how we speak,” says Sophie Dawes

Like wildfire

Jamaicans are slowly identifying with African culture

But despite some of the cultural and historical links between Africa and Jamaica some people do not want to accept the link.

“Some of my students sometimes don’t seem very proud to be called African, they associate the place with poverty, starvation. They often think who’d wanna be an African,” says Barry Chevannes, an anthropologist at the University of the West Indies.

But Olalaken says that the people in Jamaica need to look beyond the poverty, corruption and HIV and Aids headlines to the real Africa.

By doing so, they will be able to more easily embrace their African roots.

“There needs to be a little bit more of an introduction to the real African culture. Recently the Jamaican public have been watching African movies which have caught on like wildfire - they haven’t seen things like this before and slowly they are identifying with African culture.”

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Two sisters from California make their trek across America in a Volvo covered with Obama stickers

….and Bill T. Jones honors the late Nigerian musician Fela Kuti

Fela, was a Nigerian multi-instrumentalist musician and composer, pioneer of Afrobeat music, human rights activist, and political maverick. More about Fela Kuti

Fela Kuti on African ‘Colonial Mentality’

Fela Performing in Lagos, Nigeria

Listen to African Music Videos here: http://video.africanmusicforum.com/

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Patience Ozokwor a.k.a ‘Mama G’ is a well-known face in the Nigerian home video industry. Patience has also veered into music to conquer the entire world of showbiz……[MORE >>]

The talented actress from Enugu-Ngwo, Enugu State, who everybody loves because of her notable interpretation of roles, speaks about her past, acting career, dabbling into music and plans for the future in this encounter with MAGI MICHAEL….[MORE >>]

   [Patience Ozokwor]
Patience plays the role of wicked women so well in her films that people find it hard to view her as a different person in real life situations. According to her own count, she has appeared in more than 200 hundred movies since joining the industry.

Though she claims to be lazy at reading scripts over and over again, she fits into the characters so easily, to her own surprise.

A proud and caring mother of four, the multi-talented actress who lost he husband a few years back, had stints as a Teacher, Broadcaster, and owner of a fashion Institute before settling into acting.

Her musical genre is “Highlife,” which originated in Ghana and spread to Sierra Leone and Nigeria in the 1920s and other West African countries. It is very popular in Liberia and all of English-speaking West Africa, although little has been produced in other countries due to economic challenges brought on by war and instability. “Joromi” is a sub-genre.

Highlife is characterized by jazzy horns and multiple guitars which lead the band. Recently, it has acquired an uptempo, synth-driven sound…..[MORE >>]

Want more video? GO HERE

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By CHRISTOPHER CLAREY

Power, pressure serving and grass-court experience prevailed Thursday as Serena and Venus Williams earned the right to make the final a family affair.

WIMBLEDON, England — Standing on the now-patchy grass of Centre Court on Thursday and smiling at her family in the players’ box with delight and a bit of relief in her eyes, Serena Williams was also looking at the only woman left who can stop her from winning a third Wimbledon title.

That would be her older sister Venus, who will try to win her fifth singles title at the All England Club.

   Serena, left, and Venus Williams will meet in the women’s singles finals at Wimbledon.

It has been five years since the Williamses played each other for a Grand Slam trophy, five years since Serena beat Venus here in straight sets in the 2003 final; five years since the sisters dominated their sport and the rest of the field was trying in vain to catch up to their power, athleticism and self-belief……[MORE >>]

REFERENCES:

>> Why Serena Williams will not vote for Barack Obama

Venus Williams quote: “Some people say that I have an attitude- Maybe I do. But I think that you have to. You have to believe in yourself when no one else does- that makes you a winner right there.”

Popularity: 16% [?]

By: KEVIN J KELLEY

Right-wing Christian Activists in the United States are attempting to use Senator Barack Obama’s Kenyan links to discredit him.

Sen. Barrack Obama [L] & Prime Minister Raila Odinga [R]
The activists, most of them conseervative Christians, claim that Mr Obama is a relative of Prime Minister Raila Odinga, whom they describe as a “socialist who plans to introduce Sharia Law in Kenya“.

Mr Obama is leading his party’s presidential nominations and is almost certain to win against Senator Hillary Clinton.

He also stands a good chance against Senator John McCain of the rival Republican Party, thus making history as the first non-white to become a US president.

For the past two decades, American presidential campaigns have been conducted with every aspect of a candidate’s life placed under the microscope.

Analysts expect the Republicans to scour Mr Obama’s Kenyan links to find anything that they can use against him.

Some of the most widely circulated allegations originated last month in a chain e-mail from Celeste Davis, an American Christian missionary who, together with her husband Loren Davis, claims to have worked in Kenya for 12 years.

The Davises allege that Senator Obama donated nearly $1 million (approximately Ksh61 million) to the Orange Democratic Movement’s campaign last year. “Obama and Raila speak daily,” the Davises add, claiming that the two men are cousins.

Bizarre and discredited

Mr Odinga’s spokesman, Mr. Salim Lone, dismissed the allegations as bizarre and discredited.

“These are bizarre accusations that lack credibility. The allegations that the Prime Minister has socialist and pro-Mulism leanings were discussed and discredited in the last campaign,” he said.

“This is the work of right-wing activists who are trying to puncture holes in Senator Barack Obama’s campaign for the White House by attempting to resurrect allegations that were discredited in Kenya during the campaign,” he said.

Nairobi-based political scientist, Tom Wolf, an American, said that the Internet smear campaign against Mr Obama was an act of desperation.

“It just shows how desperate the Republicans are that Obama is viewed as a serious threat that they would have to use such irrelevant campaign tactics. If the Americans were worried, would they be so close to him? You recall that someone tried to use the Somali robes to discredit him,” he said.

If the Cold War were still on and communism were still alive, and Raila had spent a weekend with some communist leader like Fidel Castro, he said, it would be much more of an issue.

“But if you criticise Obama because he is related to a Kenyan leader who arrived at a compromise over the disputed election to save his nation, how would that hurt him?” Mr Wolf asked.

Mr Lone described the e-mail campaign as one of the last gasp efforts by right-wing activists in the US to dent Senator Obama’s campaign to become the Democratic Party’s standard bearer in the race to the White House.

Mr Lone, however, claimed that Mr Odinga and Senator Obama were related by blood and came from the same clan.

“It is true that the Prime Minister and the senator are related. Senator Obama comes from a family and clan to which the Prime Minister’s mother belongs, and they are cousins,” he said.

In the American sense, a cousin is the child of your parents’ siblings. But in Luo culture, the members of your father’s or mother’s clans are your cousins.

A clan would typically have hundreds of thousands of members, and the relationship is more social than biological.

Mr Obama is the son of Barack Obama Sr of Nyangoma-Kogelo, Siaya, and Ann Dunham of Wichita, Kansas.

He was raised by his maternal grandparents. In October last year, Mrs Lynne Cheney, wife of US Vice-President Dick Cheney, announced that she had discovered, while researching a book on their family, that Mr Cheney and Mr Obama were blood relatives.

They were eighth cousins, she said, with a common ancestor, a 17th-century immigrant from France.

The Illinois senator is acknowledged as perhaps the most charismatic American politician since John F Kennedy.

December election

Mr Davis and his wife, noting Mr Odinga’s contention that the December 27 presidential voting was rigged, said in their message, “As we watch Obama rise in the US we are sure that whatever happens, he will use the same tactic, crying rigged election if he doesn’t win and possibly cause a race war in America.”

A conservative Internet commentator, Michael Gaynor, speculated earlier this month that Senator Clinton’s campaign might play “the Kenya card” against Mr Obama.

Mr Gaynor says “the Kenya card” involves unspecified connections between the Kenyan-American senator and “the radical Kenyan prime minister.”

An author who succeeded in smearing Democratic Senator John Kerry in the 2004 US presidential race may also make negative use of Senator Obama’s Kenyan heritage.

A February 27 report by the McClatchy-Tribune News Service in the US says that author Jerome Corsi intends to research “Obama’s connections to Kenyan opposition leader Raila Odinga and Odinga’s ties to Muslim groups.”

Mr Corsi wrote Unfit for Command, a text effectively used by Republican Party partisans seeking to discredit Senator Kerry’s service in the US military during the Vietnam war.

Evidence assembled by Mr Kerry and his supporters showed that these charges were either exaggerated or flatly false.

The Davises’ allegations concerning Senator Obama and Mr Odinga “are all kinds of false,” states an online commentator for The New Republic, a respected US political magazine.

But one effect of the response to the Davises’ lies by so prestigious a magazine will be to call further attention to those lies.

Politifact, a political accuracy check maintained by two reputable and non-partisan publications – The St Petersburg (Florida) Times and Congressional Quarterly – published a detailed rebuttal of the Davises’ claims in a May 2 analysis by researcher Amy Hollyfield.

She quoted Mr Lone as saying: “This is absolutely ridiculous” in regard to the Davises’ claim that a group associated with Senator Obama donated nearly $1 million (Sh62 million) to the ODM campaign. “Mr Obama did not donate a single cent to Mr Odinga’s campaign,” Mr Lone told Politifact.

He said the group the Davises say gave the money to ODM does not exist, Politifact reports, citing several US election campaign monitoring organisations, including one sponsored by the US government.

Politifact also investigated the Davises’ claim that Mr Obama is a cousin of Mr Odinga.

That assertion is based on a BBC interview in January in which Mr Odinga said, “Barack Obama’s father is my maternal uncle.”

The BBC then asked, “You’re related to him?” Mr Odinga replied: “Yes, I am.”

The Obama campaign denies that the senator and Mr Odinga are cousins. And three Kenya experts interviewed by Politifact also dismissed this claim, Ms Hollyfield reports.

Normal sense

“To my knowledge, they are not first cousins in the normal sense,” Kenya election expert Joel Barkan, a professor emeritus at the University of Iowa, told Politifact.

“To my knowledge, there’s absolutely no relationship at all.”

Prof Barkan also took issue with the Davises’ characterisation of Mr Odinga as a “socialist.”

Such a charge is intended to incite still-virulent anti-communist sentiments among many Americans and to suggest that Senator Obama has a sinister, far-left agenda that he is concealing from US voters.

“He’s a populist politician,” Prof Barkan says of Mr Odinga, “but he’s no socialist.”

Because the Davises’ e-mail was written by missionaries long active in Kenya, “it somehow carries more credence than your average blog posting — and it’s spreading rapidly,” Politifact commented.

“But even with the credibility of a real author, the claims in this e-mail are as baseless as anything you’ve read from an anonymous blogger.”

Speaking to the Sunday Nation Saturday, Mr Lone said Mr Odinga and Mr Obama enjoy good relations.

However, Mr Lone was categorical that Senator Obama and the PM have never sat down to discuss their ideological commitments owing to the fact they play politics in different environments.

“Claims that the two have discussed their ideological commitments are completely far-fetched. The senator has Kenyan roots, but he is an American first and foremost,” he said. He further dismissed claims that Senator Obama, or groups connected to him, contributed to Mr Odinga’s campaign kitty, stating that they never received a cent from the Illinois senator.

Mr Davis and his wife claim to have preached among Muslims for 20 years, 12 of them in Kenya.

Their ministry is said to be based in Meru.

The Sunday Nation’s efforts to track them or their Kenyan ministry down Saturday were fruitless by the time of going to press.

REFERENCES:

1. Odinga says Obama is his cousin — Kenyan opposition leader Raila Odinga has said he is a cousin of US presidential hopeful Barack Obama.
2. Could US elect a Luo before Kenya? — It is said there is a bitter joke among Kenya’s Luo community that the United States of America will elect a member of their tribe as president before the East African country does.

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