Dancin Time (TV-PG)

Here is a crash course in how to dance dancehall reggae music. Big up Buju Banton.


Bonita Jamaica

Beautiful Place. Amazing People.

See you in Jamaica.

Meet Kofi Kingston - Jamaican Wrestler

Wrestling has a new Jamaican superstar. His real name is Kofi Sarkodi-Mensah, but don’t you ever call him that. He goes by the name Kofi Kingston. We would like to say congratulations and big up to Kofi Kingston. Go get ‘em and keep that Jamaican flag flying high. Bim!

Kofi Kingston’s Wiki Profile

Kofi Kingston’s Pix and Videos

Bonita Jamaica

Beautiful Place. Amazing People.

See you in Jamaica.

New Book on Marcus Garvey: 'Negro With a Hat'

Marcus Garvey in many ways symbolizes the greatness of Jamaica and Jamaicans. He wasn't very tall and he was not from riches, but he was a brilliant leader and a true visionary. What he did for people of African Ancestry worldwide remains invaluable even today. Marcus Garvey was about self pride, dignity, and respect for people of African ancestry, among other things. Many places and things have been named after him all over the world. He is Jamaica's first national hero. And yet there are still people today who contend that Marcus Garvey's life was a failure. Yup, haters and naysayers have been set loose upon the earth.

Biographer Colin Grant takes a look (yes, add yet another look to the long list of looks) at the life of Marcus Garvey in his new book Negro With a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey and His Dream of Mother Africa. We are not sure that we like that title Colin, but hey, whatever floats your boat.

Here is the Guardian Unlimited's take on Colin Grant's new book:

Click here: Negro With a Hat

Bonita Jamaica
Beautiful Place. Amazing People.

See you in Jamaica.

Stephen Marley's 'Mind Control' Wins Reggae Grammy

Congratulations Stephen Marley. Bim!

Click: List of the 2008 Grammy Awards Winners

Bonita Jamaica
Beautiful Place. Amazing People.

See you in Jamaica.

Lorna Goodison Wins B.C. National Award for Non-Fiction

Lorna Goodison, author of From Harvey River, a memoir about growing up in Jamaica, has won the 2008 B.C.'s National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction. She accepted the $40,000 prize Thursday with tears in her eyes.

"I am accepting this award on behalf of all the people from the Caribbean who are now Canadians, who hold this country dear, as I have come to hold it dear," said Goodison, 60, who is best known for her poetry.

She has lived in the United States as well as in Jamaica and Canada, now dividing her time mainly between Toronto and Ann Arbor, Mich., since she teaches at the University of Michigan. With husband Edward (Ted) Chamberlin, also a university professor and author, she cherishes holiday time at B.C.'s Halfmoon Bay, where she finished writing From Harvey River: A Memoir of My Mother and Her People.

At the lunchtime award ceremony at the Pan Pacific Hotel, where Premier Gordon Campbell spoke fluently about how great non-fiction helps readers to "move beyond the edge of what we know about ourselves," each of the three finalists for the award received an eloquent tribute.

Describing From Harvey River, Gary Geddes (author, most recently, of Falsework, poems about the 1958 collapse of the Second Narrows Bridge) called it "a paean to family." He said: "It's been a rich learning experience for me -- indeed, a revelation -- to discover not only fine writing but also an attractive and discerning sensibility" in the book.

Goodison writes of her late mother, who raised nine children, of whom Lorna was the eighth. Her hands always smelled of onions because of the amount of cooking she did.

Lawyer Keith Mitchell, chairman of the BC Achievement Foundation, which gives the award, said a thread about the importance of family runs through the other two books, as well.

Jurors David Mitchell, Patrick Lane and Sandra Martin, who chose the short list from a 10-book long list and, ultimately, 90 submissions, thought that Jacques Poitras's Beaverbrook: A Shattered Legacy (about whether the art treasures amassed by press baron Lord Beaverbrook were a loan or a gift to the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton, N.B.) would make as good a winner as Goodison's memoir.

"You're all winners today," Mitchell, a vice-principal of Ontario's Queen's University, had told Poitras, Goodison and Donald Harman Akenson before making the announcement.

Akenson's book, Some Family: The Mormons and How Humanity Keeps Track of Itself, is about the Family History Library of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the world's pre-eminent trove of genealogical information.

Paul Whitney, city librarian with the Vancouver Public Library, said Some Family is an example of "that sweet spot, for a university press, where academic expertise and research intersect with the preoccupations of the general public."

It's published by McGill-Queen's University Press. Beaverbrook comes from Goose Lane Editions, while McClelland & Stewart published From Harvey River (one of five books on the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction short list).

Poitras and Akenson each received $2,500.

The award, which was $25,000 in its first three years, rose over the summer to $40,000 -- the amount of the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Scotiabank Giller Prize.

Source: The Vancouver Sun

Bonita Jamaica
Beautiful Place. Amazing People.

See you in Jamaica.

A Gift from Reggae Superstar Luciano

Bonita Jamaica would like to thank Reggae Superstar Luciano for this lovely present. Luciano's new album, Jah Is My Navigator, in stores now. Get it.

Bim!

Bonita Jamaica
Beautiful Place. Amazing People.

See you in Jamaica.

Monsignor Gladstone Wilson - The 7th Most Learned Man in the World

This man right here was greater than great. Show some respect. RIP Monsignor Wilson.

RT. Reverend Monsignor Gladstone Orlando Stanislaus Wilson (1906-1974) Class of 1921Ph.D., M.A., B.A Hons, B.D., D.D., D.C.L., B.C.L., F.R.S.A, Dip. Soc. Sc. (Diploma in Social Science)

Born March 10, 1906, in Mavis Bank, St. Andrew.
Father: Nelson Cameron Wilson
Mother: Rose Anne (nee Moore)

Was tutored privately by his parents as a boy and won three scholarships.

He attended St. George’s College, 1918-1922

Roman Catholic Priest, Educator-Lecturer, Traveller and Linguist
Chancellor and Secretor of the Curia

Vicariate Apostolic of Jamaica from 1940 (many times in charge of the Vicariate)
Elevated to Monsignor in 1950

Member of:
Catholic Inter-Racial Council of America
American Association of Social Workers
Many Government, Educational, Social and Civic Boards in Jamaica

1923 – 1925 Worked in the Civil Service in the Kingston Collectorate and Surveyor General’s Department.

1926-1931 Urban College Rome (Resident Scholar)
B.A Hons. – Won the Latin, Greek, Natural History Awards and the Chancellor’s Philosophical Scholarship

1929 Ph.D. summa cum laude

1930 Gold Medallist and Prizeman in Psychology, Moral Philosophy, and History of Philosophy, B.D. (Hons.)

1930-31 President Newman Club (literary Association for English speaking students In Rome)

1931, Dec. 24, Ordained by His Eminence William Cardinal Van Rossum, by special permission of His Holiness Pope PiosXI

1932 D.D. "magna cum laude” Faculty of Philosophy, winning Chancellor's Prize for general excellence

1932-33 Tutor, Urban College, Rome (distinction only West Indian, and Negro to occupy post)

1933 Associate Lecturer in Missiology and Modern Language, Vatican University

1934 Candidate for Vatican Diplomatic Service; B.C.L. Faculty of Law

1936 D.C.L "summa cum laude." Achieved Faculty Fellowship in 1936

1937-38 Attached Jamaica Mission

1938 Clinical work in Manhattan State Hospital Ward U.S.A.

1940 Graduate student Fordham University (Sociology and Psychiatry), M.A., (Sociology) and Diploma in Social work

Selected by ballot, under-grad., Representative Urban College (1927) Official celebrations, Tercentenary Estab. Urban College, and Golden Jubilee (1929). Pope Pius XI, who personally complimented him on Speeches, delivered on both distinguished occasions

Was associated with His Holiness Pope Pius XII, Eugenio Pacelli when Secretary of State and as Supernumerary Chaplain to the then late Cardinal Lamenti, Prefect of the Sacred Congregation of Rites

Made contributions to several specialized Magazines and Journals; considered one of the most highly qualified Ecclesiastics in the Roman Catholic organization

Travelled extensively in Europe, and the Americas, and spoke several languages fluently, including French, Spanish, Italian, German, Portuguese, Latin, Greek and Hebrew

He delivered the homily at the re-interment of National Hero Marcus Mosiah Garvey in 1964.

Considered to be the seventh most learned person in the world at the time of his death on December 1, 1974.

RT. Reverend Monsignor Gladstone Orlando Stanislaus Wilson was inducted in 2000 into the St. George's College Hall of Fame and named St. George's College Student of the 20th Century.

St. George's College Old Boys Association - Ontario Chapter

Bonita Jamaica
Beautiful Place. Amazing People.

See you in Jamaica.

Roger Mais - Journalist, Novelist, Poet and Playwright

Roger Mais (August 11, 1905 Kingston−June 21, 1955 Kingston) was a Jamaican journalist, novelist, poet, and playwright.

Mais was perhaps the most important writer to emerge from the nationalist movement which began with the labour rebellion of 1938. His play of that year, George William Gordon, which focused on the Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865, played an important role in the rehabilitation of the eponymous character, who was in conventional colonial history described as a rebel and traitor, and who would be proclaimed, on the centenary of the rebellion, a National Hero.

Mais became a writer for the weekly newspaper, Public Opinion, which was associated with the People's National Party. A column he wrote for the newspaper, entitled "Now We Know", critical of British colonial policy resulted in his imprisonment for sedition.

This period of imprisonment was instrumental in the development of his first novel, The Hills Were Joyful Together, a work focused on working-class life in the Kingston of the 1940s. Mais's second novel, Brother Man, was a sympathetic exploration of the emergent Rastafari movement.

While Mais's first two novels had urban settings, his third novel, Black Lightning centred on an artist living in the countryside.

Mais was also known as a poet, and showed a fine command of lyricism, and a short-story writer. His short stories were collected in a volume entitled Listen, The Wind, thirty-two years after his death.

Mais's novels have been republished posthumously several times, an indication of his continuing importance to Caribbean literary history. He also had an influence on younger writers of the pre-independence period, notably John Hearne.

Bonita Jamaica
Beautiful Place. Amazing People.

See you in Jamaica.