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Article

Afewerq, Gebre Iyesus  

Baye Yimam

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

Ethiopian painter, diplomat, customs director, entrepreneur, linguist, university professor, and novelist, was born in Zage, Gojjam province of Ethiopia, on 10 July 1868. His father, Gebre Iyesus Denke, was a priest serving a local church, and his mother, Fenta Tehun Adego Ayechew, was presumably a housewife. In Zage, then a center of learning, Afewerq learned the painting, poetry, church music, and liturgical dancing of the Ethiopian Orthodox Christian tradition.

Afewerq was related to Empress Taytu Betul, wife of Emperor Menilek (1844–1913 on account of which he was brought to the palace to continue what he had started in Zage He was later sent to Italy to further his studies at the Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti in Turin Upon his return from Italy he began to produce mural paintings by order of the palace and decorated the churches at Entotto then the capital city However he soon ...

Article

Artel, Jorge  

Francisco Ortega

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

Jorge Artel, whose real name was Agapito de Arcos, was born in Colombia, in the colonial city of Cartagena de Indias, once the major entryway for slaves into the Spanish colonies in South America. He grew up surrounded by the drumbeats of the cumbia music, slavery's violent legacies, and the history of resistance embodied in the many maroon communities that dotted the city's borders. In his poetry he evokes those images, especially, as Lawrence Prescott has noted, using the symbol of the drum as the unifying thread essential to the black experience in the Americas. Like other black poets in Spanish America, such as the Afro-Peruvian Nicomedes Santa Cruz (1925–1992) and the Cuban Nicolás Guillén (1902–1989 Artel does not single out race alone as the defining element that has shaped his life and his aesthetic vision For him as for the others class ...

Article

Barudi, Mahmud Sami al-  

Geoffrey Roper

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

Egyptian poet, diplomat, military commander, and politician, was born in Cairo on 6 October 1839. His family claimed descent from a medieval Mamluk royal line, but his surname (nisba) refers to the district of Ityay al-Barud in Lower Egypt, of which his ancestors had once been tax farmers (multazims). His father, an artillery officer under Muhammad Ali, died in Sudan when al-Barudi was only seven years old. After primary education, al-Barudi entered the Military Training School in Cairo, in 1851, and graduated from it in 1855 with the rank of bash-jawish (sergeant-major). During the reign of the viceroy Saʿid (r. 1854–1863), he served in Istanbul as a diplomat and during this time acquired a lifelong enthusiasm for literature.

In 1863 the new viceroy, Ismaʿil (r. 1863–1879 visited Istanbul and recruited al Barudi as commander of his Viceregal Guard in Cairo with the ...

Article

Bellegarde, Dantès  

Patrick Bellegarde-Smith

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

Dantès Bellegarde was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti in 1877. His family had long been at the center of Haitian politics. Bellegarde's mother was Marie Boisson and his father Jean-Louis Bellegarde. His maternal great-grandfather, Jacques Ignace Fresnel, was named judge by Jean-Jacques Dessalines, a leader of the Haitian Revolution, who became the first leader of the independent state in 1804 and soon proclaimed himself Emperor Jean-Jacques I. This same great-grandfather was later minister of justice under President Jean-Pierre Boyer, who ruled all of Haiti from 1820 to 1843. Bellegarde's paternal grandfather, Jean-Louis de Bellegarde, was a duke and marshal in Haiti's second empire during the rule of Faustin Soulouque, who declared himself emperor and ruled from 1847 to 1859. Bellegarde's aunt, Argentine Bellegarde (1842–1901), was a noted educator and an early feminist. Bellegarde married Cécile Savain (1875–1965 ...

Article

Bin, Jallun, ʿAbd al-Majid  

Geoffrey Roper

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
08 December 2011
Published online:
30 September 2012

Moroccan Arabic writer, journalist, and diplomat (not to be confused with the francophone writer Abdelmajid Benjelloun, born in 1944), was born in Casablanca. At the age of five months, he was taken by his parents to Manchester, where his father worked as a merchant. He attended primary school there, and became the darling of a small community of immigrants. The loss of both his mother and his sister while he was still young had a profound effect on him, reinforced by his reading of Charles Dickens; the emotional consequences of this loss can be found in his writings.

He returned to Morocco with his father at the age of nine They took up residence in Fez where Bin Jallun received his secondary education and then enrolled in the ancient Islamic university of the Qarawiyin The pervasive atmosphere there was one of traditional Arabic learning and culture and this made a ...

Article

Cabral, Manuel del  

José Manuel Batista

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
01 June 2016
Published online:
31 May 2017

was born Manuel Cabral Tavárez in Santiago de los Caballeros on 7 March 1907. His father was Mario Fermín Cabral y Baez, who was infamously close to President Rafael Leonidas Trujillo as president of the Senate and coiner of the moniker Ciudad Trujillo (Trujillo City), given to the capital of the Dominican Republic, Santo Domingo de Guzmán, from 1936 to 1961. Cabral’s mother was Amelia Tavárez Saviñón, a well-known socialite of Santiago, but he was raised by his maternal aunt Carmita “Cacán” Tavárez. Cabral had two presidents, several generals, and notable powerbrokers of the Santiago elite in his family tree. He was a versatile poet who gained renown early in his career for depicting, in verse, the harsh social realities endured by the Dominican rural poor, Haitians, and cocolos black migrants from the English and French Antilles that sought work in the sugar mills of the Dominican ...

Article

Carter, William Beverly, Jr.  

Arlene Lazarowitz

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

newspaper publisher and ambassador, was born in Coatesville, Pennsylvania, the son of William Beverly Carter and Maria Green. After a childhood spent in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Carter graduated in 1944 from Lincoln University, a historically black institution in Pennsylvania. As a student he was a member of Alpha Boule, Sigma Pi Phi, and Kappa Alpha Psi, and he served as executive secretary of the alumni association from 1952 to 1955. He attended Temple University Law School from 1946 to 1947 and the New School for Social Research from 1950 to 1951.

Early in his professional career, from 1943 to 1945, Carter worked as a reporter for the Philadelphia Tribune. He was city editor of the Philadelphia Afro-American from 1945 to 1948 and publisher of the Pittsburgh Courier newspaper group from 1955 to 1964. In 1958 he served as president of the National Newspaper Publishers ...

Article

Darío, Rubén  

Leonel Delgado Aburto

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
01 June 2016
Published online:
31 May 2017

was born Félix Rubén García Sarmiento in the small town of Metapa, now known as Ciudad Darío, Nicaragua, on 18 January 1867. Known primarily by his pen name, Rubén Darío, he was the leader of modernismo, the most important literary movement produced in Latin America at the end of the nineteenth century. A gifted and famous poet, Darío was also a remarkable journalist, short-story writer, and diplomat. He was the child of the failed marriage between Manuel García and Rosa Sarmiento, and was raised by a great-aunt (Bernarda Sarmiento) and her husband (army colonel Félix Ramírez) in León, a city that was the traditional stronghold of political liberalism in Nicaragua in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His ancestry was a mix of European, indigenous, and African descent.

In his early poetry Darío expressed some radical positions including condemning the authoritarianism of the pope In the provincial environment of ...

Article

Debrot, Cola “Nicolaas”  

Juan-Carlos Goilo

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
01 June 2016
Published online:
31 May 2017

was born in Kralendijk, on the island of Bonaire, on 4 May 1902. He was brought up in Bonaire, Curaçao, and Venezuela by his Protestant Swiss father, a colonial plantation owner named Jean Jacques Debrot, and his Catholic Venezuelan mother, Maria Antoinette Clemence Nouel. He started writing at a very early age and published his first collection of poems in 1918. He studied law in the Netherlands in 1921, and in 1928 moved to Paris, where he lived for three years and worked as a ghostwriter. In 1931 Debrot returned to the Netherlands to study medicine. He is considered a pioneer of Dutch Antillean literature.

Debrot s writing emerged during his years in Europe He was exposed to quite a number of artists One could imagine other Caribbean figures such as Aimé Césaire moving in similar artistic circles In Paris he was a friend of pamphleteer Louis ...

Article

Dennis, Lawrence  

Steven Leikin

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

diplomat, preacher, and author, was born in Atlanta, Georgia, the son of Sallie Montgomery. Nothing is known of his biological father. His mother, however, was an African American, and Dennis was of mixed race parentage. In 1897 he was adopted by Green Dennis, a contractor, and Cornelia Walker. During his youth Dennis was known as the “mulatto child evangelist,” and he preached to church congregations in the African American community of Atlanta before he was five years old. By the age of fifteen he had toured churches throughout the United States and England and addressed hundreds of thousands of people.

Despite his success as an evangelist Dennis had ambitions to move beyond this evangelical milieu. In 1913, unschooled but unquestionably bright, he applied to Phillips Exeter Academy and gained admission. He graduated within two years and in 1915 entered Harvard.

Dennis s decisions to ...

Article

Dorsinville, Roger  

Claudy Delné

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
01 June 2016
Published online:
31 May 2017

was born on 11 March 1911 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, into a family of the petty bourgeoisie. He was the son of Edith Lahens and Hénec Dorsinville, a lawyer and a government employee. Dorsinville grew up during the US military occupation of Haiti. He was only 4 years old when he witnessed an angry mob dragging the corpse of Haitian President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam through the streets of the capital city. This singular event in Haitian politics was used as pretext for the US military intervention in 1915.

Dorsinville’s father was the owner of the literary magazine L’Essor It was through this journal and under the rigorous mentorship of his father that the younger Dorsinville made his very first attempts at writing and literary reviews Although he attended the most elite schools in Port au Prince including Les Démoiselles Gardère Petit Séminaire Collège St Martial les Frères Saint Louis ...

Article

Ellis, George Washington  

John E. Fleming and Rayford W. Logan

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

Born in Weston, Platte County, Missouri, George Washington Ellis was the son of George and Amanda Jane (Drace) Ellis. He studied in the Weston elementary schools and the high school in Atchison, Kansas. He received his bachelor of law degree from the University of Kansas in 1893 and was admitted to the Kansas bar. From 1893 to 1897 he practiced law in Kansas to defray the expenses of four years in the university's collegiate department, and received his bachelor of arts degree in 1897. In that same year, he moved to New York City, where he took a two-year course in the Gunton Institute of Economics and Sociology.

After passing the examination of the United States Census Board in 1899, Ellis received an appointment in the Census Division of the Department of the Interior in Washington, D.C. where he remained two years Here his spare ...

Article

Firmin, Anténor Joseph  

David M. Carletta

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
06 April 2006
Published online:
01 December 2006

Anténor Joseph Firmin was born in Cap-Haïtien in northern Haiti. He was a gifted child who attended Haiti's premier preparatory schools. After studying law, Firmin became the inspector of schools in Cap-Haïtien. He married Rosa Salnave, daughter of the former president Sylvain Salnave, in 1881. Two years later the government of Haiti sent Firmin to France as a diplomat. He was admitted to the Anthropological Society of Paris and became perhaps the first scholar of African descent to write a systematic work of anthropology.

In 1885 he published The Equality of the Human Races, a response to Count Arthur de Gobineau's four-volume set The Inequality of Human Races and to the racialist anthropology of the nineteenth century. Published between 1853 and 1855 de Gobineau s famous work was the first to assert the racial superiority of Aryan peoples while simultaneously reinforcing ideas of black inferiority Firmin ...

Article

Jones, Melville Benoni “M. B.”  

Hassoum Ceesay

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
31 May 2013

Gambian nationalist politician, journalist, and editor popularly called M. B. Jones, was born in 1918, in Bathurst (now Banjul) in Gambia, to Aku parents. Like his mentor E. F. Small, he combined crusading journalism with militant politics and trade unionism to challenge British colonial rule. As a cub reporter under E. F. Small at the Gambia Outlook, he wrote astoundingly courageous denunciations of the infamous Newspapers Ordinances of 1944, via which the British Colonial Office sought to stifle the voice of the few independent newspapers in Bathurst. Jones inherited the Gambia Outlook from Small in 1958 and edited it for many decades until the mid-1980s, when poor health made it difficult for him to continue.

Jones was uncompromising in his stand against colonial rule and wayward colonial officials He never hesitated to expose and condemn white colonial officials and settlers who abused their powers or were racist ...

Article

Jones, Richard “Dick Jones” Lee  

Elizabeth R. Schroeder

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
15 March 2013
Published online:
31 May 2013

journalist, businessman, military leader, and diplomat, was born in Albany, Georgia, to Richard and Eliza (Brown) Jones. Richard Lee Jones, also known as Dick Jones, moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, with his family at fifteen saying

In the South, I was not the submissive kind, but I learned respect for authority. Many Negroes have not learned that yet. They come up here and try to run away with the town. I had no trouble in the South. I avoided trouble. If you see a nail, why sit on it? Much trouble could be avoided by Negroes in the South if they tried to. Get me straight! I am not for conditions down there. They are bad, but could be bettered.”

(Wilson, “Interview with Dick Jones, Manager of South Center,” Negro in Illinois Papers)

He attended the University of Cincinnati from 1912 to 1915 and later abandoned his law ...

Article

Marrero Aristy, Ramón  

Marveta Ryan

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

Although poverty prevented Ramón Marrero Aristy from attending school regularly, he studied on his own. As a young man, he wrote stories while he worked as the storeroom clerk of a Sugar plantation. Some of his early stories were published in a newspaper in the capital city of Santo Domingo, and the newspaper soon hired him as a writer. During his career, he worked as an editor of three newspapers, La Opinión, Listín Diario, and La Nación. He also directed the illustrated review Babeque.

Marrero worked for the government of Rafael Trujillo, who dominated the Dominican Republic from 1930 to 1961. Despite his lack of support for the Trujillo dictatorship, Marrero served twice as the state secretary of labor. He also held diplomatic posts in France and the United States.

Marrero wrote two collections of short stories, Perfiles agrestes (1933 and ...

Article

Martí, José  

Alan West

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

José Martí is one of the major figures of nineteenth-century Latin America. He is regarded by Cubans across the political spectrum as the father of Cuba's independence. His collected works span some twenty-eight volumes and include exquisite poetry, insightful essays on Whitman and Emerson, impassioned political analysis, and a remarkable book of children's literature, La edad de oro (1889).

While still an adolescent, Martí embraced the cause of Cuban independence, founding the newspaper La Patria Libre in 1869. He was imprisoned and then banished for writing a letter denouncing a Spanish fellow student. After 1871 Martí spent a great deal of his life outside of Cuba (Mexico, Guatemala, Spain), and most of the years between 1881 and 1895 in New York where he dedicated himself to the Cuban independence movement as a brilliant orator journalist fund raiser and political leader He ...

Article

Nabuco, Joaquim  

Aaron Myers

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

Born in Recife, Brazil, into an aristocratic and politically active family, Joaquim Nabuco spent the first eight years of his life on his family's large Sugar plantation in the northeastern province of Pernambuco. He later moved with his parents to Rio de Janeiro, then attended the prestigious law academies of São Paulo and Recife. At the former he met Antônio De Castro Alves, “the Poet of the Slaves,” and the abolitionist Rui Barbosa. Between 1873 and 1876 he made several trips to Europe and the United States, where he learned about abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison, in the process strengthening his belief in abolition.

Nabuco opposed slavery for moral reasons At the age of eight he became aware of the cruelties of slavery when a slave from a nearby plantation approached him and begged to be purchased by Nabuco s family explaining that his ...

Article

Ortiz, Adalberto  

Jean Mutaba Rahier

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
07 April 2005
Published online:
01 December 2006

When Adalberto Ortiz was only three months old, his mother and grandmother abruptly fled the city of Esmeraldas with him to escape from the civil war launched by the Esmeraldian colonel Carlos Concha against the national government in Quito, Ecuador. Leaving Ortiz's father behind, the family found refuge in the city of Guayaquil, where Ortiz's mother joined a convent and the boy grew up with his maternal grandmother. He discovered his father in Esmeraldas when he was eleven years old. Due to family financial constraints, Ortiz had to work at a young age. An assiduous reader, he soon developed a taste for literature. In 1928 he obtained a scholarship to study in the Colegio Normal Juan Montalvo in Quito, which was one of the most exclusive schools in the country. He spent most of his academic holidays in Esmeraldas. He obtained his diploma as a schoolteacher in 1937 ...

Article

Rowan, Carl T.  

Frank A. Salamone

Article

Publication History:

Published in print:
09 February 2009
Published online:
01 December 2009

journalist, diplomat, civil rights advocate, and philanthropist. Carl Thomas Rowan was born in Ravenscroft, Tennessee, but was raised in McMinnville. Rowan attended Tennessee State University and Washburn University in the 1940s and then became one of the first African American commissioned officers in the U.S. Navy. In 1943 the navy sent him to Northwestern for summer training as an officer, but Northwestern refused him residence because he was black. So the navy transferred him to Oberlin. After the war he returned to Oberlin because, according to his autobiography, Breaking Barriers (1991), “Oberlin would permit me to study in a special oasis, sheltered from the hurts, the anger, the rage, that all victims of racism experience.” He graduated from Oberlin in 1947 and from the University of Minnesota—with a master's degree in journalism—in 1948.

Rowan's journalism career began in 1948 at the Minneapolis Tribune ...