Kwame Ture lecture series begin June 27

THE launch of the Kwame Ture Memorial Lecture Series (KTMLS), hosted by the Emancipation Support Committee (ESCTT), is scheduled for June 27 at 5 pm. The launch, as well as the series, will take place via the ESCTT’s Facebook and YouTube pages.

The series presents a platform for conversations around ESCTT’s 2021 theme: Advancing Pan-African Solidarity Towards a Balanced World, the committee said in a media release. To achieve the objectives of the theme, the ESCTT says it seeks to deepen the education on African heritage and its place in society.

"We foster and embrace opportunities for closer Afro-Caribbean connections, as well as connections with the wider African diaspora and the African continent, connections that are geared towards advancing our collective development as a global people," the ESCTT said in a release.

The lecture series is named after Kwame Ture, whose lifelong desire was the edification and empowerment of all African people. Ture, whose original name was Stokely Carmichael, was a prominent Trinidad-born civil rights activist and one of the leaders of African-American Civil Rights struggles in the 1960s. He became internationally known for the promotion of the rallying cry, “Black Power.”

Dr Rupert Lewis, professor emeritus of political thought in the Department of Government, UWI, Mona, will delivering the feature address at the KTMLS launch. The topic for his lecture, geared for the time, will be: 100 Years: Journey from the Garvey Movement to Black Lives Matter, the release said.

Lewis is a political scientist who has published extensively on Marcus Garvey’s activities in Jamaica and the Caribbean region. He has also authored research about the Caribbean activist-intellectual, Walter Rodney. Lewis has served as member of the Council of the Institute of Jamaica and as chairman of the African-Caribbean Institute of Jamaica and Jamaica Memory Bank.

After the launch, the series will continue on July 11, 18, and 25. The topics will include: The Role of Music in advancing Pan African solidarity; African Film in advancing the African Renaissance; Re-imaging Diaspora – Continental Integration in a post covid19 World.

Khafra Kambon, ESCTT’s director of Regional and Pan African Affairs, said, “Pan-Africanism is one of the ideological and action-inspiring responses to this state of the world, which emerged over the last 500 years, and it is in the DNA of our nation. In a biological sense, it is in the bloodstream of persons who are classified as African or African descendants. But it is more than that. It is in the DNA of our political inheritance as a country.

“In 2021 we feel the need to emphasise how important it is for us to embrace our Pan-African heritage to collectively rise out of economic marginalisation, academic decline, and negative class perceptions which are further dis-empowering, antagonising and alienating our brothers and sisters who are crushed at the lowest socio-economic levels.”