Monday marked the 183rd anniversary of the birth of Marcus Garvey. The Iyanola Council for Advancement of Rastafari (ICAR) commemorated the occasion with a rally in Micoud Village on Monday afternoon. National Reparations Committee (NRC) Chair Earl Bousquet said the commemorative activities will continue with a market day at the Castries Market on August 22, followed by a concert at Derek Walcott Square on August 29.
The NRC is also preparing to mark the 90th anniversary of Garvey’s visit to Saint Lucia in October 1936. Bousquet said Garvey spent a week in Saint Lucia delivering four lectures at the old Clarke Cinema on Micoud Street in Castries.
“That was a very significant event in Saint Lucia’s history because it coincided with the period when the Ethiopian government and Ethiopian ruler, Haile Selassie, was under attack by Italy. Saint Lucia like other Caribbean people were very much in solidarity with Ethiopia.” Bousquet said.
Bousquet explained that Marcus Garvey’s lectures had a lasting impact on the island’s society and contributed to the development of the Marcus Garvey Society Hall in Choiseul.
“We intend to give more information about its [Marcus Garvey Society Hall] origin.” Bousquet said.
Bousquet added that Garvey’s lecturers were influential among the leading middle-class families of that time like the Clarke’s.
“Also it was a time when the young W Arthur Lewis, who subsequently became the youngest black professor at the London School of Economics, who was too young to attend the lecture but certainly the contents of the lecture as relayed to him help influence his course of life…and at the age of 23 in 1938 he was able to take a sabbatical from the LSE to go through all the Caribbean countries to do some research on the various strikes, which were called riots, which he described as revolutions in his first seminal book ‘Labour in the West Indies.’”
Bousquet said decades after its publication, Sir’s Arthur’s book remains the original template on how to assess reparations from Britain for the West Indies.
