Shashemene Pioneers Pop-Up Exhibition
14 July 2013
IN 2013, more than 30 years after my first visit, I returned to spend time with the Rasta community in Shashemene, Ethiopia to work with Italian filmmaker Giulia Amati. As part of the project I created a pop-up exhibition of 70 photographs I had taken in 1981. This report is from my diary of that day.
Benjamin McMahon: Jamaica Plantership
20 July 1822
BENJAMIN McMAHON spent 18 years working as a bookkeeper and overseer on Jamaican sugar estates before leaving the island in 1837. He was employed on 24 different estates and his autobiography, published in London in 1839, recounts a litany of cruel and inhuman treatments meted out to enslaved people. Here he recounts his experiences on Crawle Estate and Harmony Hall.
An audience with Joseph Nathaniel Hibbert, Rastafari patriarch
23 July 1983
THIS IS an account of the interview I conducted with Father Joseph Hibbert, one of the first people to proclaim the divinity of Haile Selassie and a key figure in the early development of Rastafari in Jamaica in the 1930s.
The first Pan African Conference
23-25 July 1900
PAN-AFRICANIST ideals emerged in the late nineteenth century in response to European colonization and exploitation of the African continent. Pan-Africanist philosophy held that slavery and colonialism depended on and encouraged negative, unfounded categorizations of the race, culture, and values of African people. These destructive beliefs in turn gave birth to intensified forms of racism, the likes of which Pan-Africanism sought to eliminate. The first conference was held in London in Westminster Town Hall (now Caxton Hall) and was attended by 37 delegates and 10 observers.