Jamaica-born Nana Farika Berhane receives 2022 Presidential Achievement Award

In 1946, at age nine, Norma Fay Hamilton was challenged by a Rastafarian who was paving a road to “study the history of Africa” after seeing her walking with an oversized book on the history of England. And, it seems like the young Hamilton took his advice.

Her biography, inter alia, says, “ Her outspoken approach placed her in the crossfire because of her work as a journalist and she migrated to the United States with her family for her safety to avoid the highly politicised violence that plagued the island of Jamaica.”

YEARS OF SERVICE

The Kingston-born evolved into Nana Farika Fayola Berhane, pan-Africanist, author, journalist, storyteller, performance poet, educator and cultural activist, who was given a Presidential Lifetime Achievement Award on Thursday, September 29, at the National Press Club in Washington, DC.

‘We are pleased to inform you that the Office of President Joseph R. Biden, Jr, and AmeriCorps have issued your award and you are invited to receive the ‘Unites States President’s Lifetime Achievement Award’ for your remarkable commitment and contributions to improving the lives of others,’ a section the invitation says.

It has been years of service for the now elderly Nana Berhane who studied journalism and creative writing at the Instituto de Allende, in Guanajuato, Mexico; the London School of Journalism, and The University of the West Indies, Mona campus. She also obtained an early childhood education certification in the Montessori Method of Education through the International Montessori Centre in England. In addition, she studied theatre arts at the Circle in the Square Theatre School.

Her education and training landed her jobs as an information officer and scriptwriter at the Jamaica Information Service and the then Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation. She was also a copywriter for The Gleaner. She has spent over 30 years as a teaching artist, literacy support and storyteller in public and private schools in the Washington, DC area. Her artist-in-residence programmes have been funded by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, Washington Very Special Arts, Faith-Based Programs and Starbucks.

She was a resident in the famous pan-African town of Nairobi, California for a decade, when she evolved into a performance poet at the Nairobi Institute of Cultural Arts Ensemble. A poetry teaching job, and arts consultancy with the California Poets in the Schools are also on her resume. At Stanford University, she was a researcher in the learning motivation of African-American children.

Nana Farika also worked with Dr Wade Nobles at his Institute for the Advanced Study of Black Family Life and Culture. And, in 1980 The University of California Berkeley appointed her a cultural consultant and leader of a heritage tour to research and study the Maroons of Jamaica. In 1985 she led UCLA music scholars to document the January 6 Accompong Town Maroon celebrations.

Nana Berhane’s list of accomplishment is not endless, but it is nonetheless impressive. Her children’s stories, Language Power 2C and Language Power 3C, were used as readers in the Jamaican education system. In the 1970s, her novella, The Story of Sandra Shaw, the first Jamaican novel written in the Jamaican language with an African Jamaican female protagonist, was groundbreaking, and has inspired many Caribbean writers. Her early literary works were published in Jamaica, the USA, and the UK, and she now has three books, I Lan in di Sun, Sing I a Song of Black Freedom, and Africa on the Move, on Amazon.

In the 1980s, she was the principal of Queen Omega Communications, whose aim was to restore the Omega balance in the Rastafari faith to empower Rastafari women. She sits on the Pan African Council of Elders of Washington, DC, and became a member of the Abeng movement for social change and volunteered as the co-editor of its newspaper, the Abeng.

REGAIN CONNECTIONS

The indefatigable activist Nana has also worked with Africans in the diaspora and the Jamaican Rastafarian community to regain their connections to Africa and their cultural autonomy. Through the instrumentality of Dr Leonard Jeffries and Dr Edward Scobie she lectured Caribbean students on New York college campuses about the Pan African spiritual foundation of Rastafari Elders. She attended the Sixth Pan African Congress as a delegate and is the only survivor of the non-government Jamaican delegation.

Because of her extensive work, Berhane has been dully rewarded. Her short stories, plays and poetry, written in the Jamaican language, won awards from the Jamaican Cultural Development Commission annual festival and in black writers contests in England during the 1960s and 1970s. The Smithsonian Institution, during their quincentennial programme, recognised her for her work with the Jamaican Maroon communities.

In reacting to this major award, among several others, she told Dr Harcourt Fuller, a Jamaican associate, that she was feeling happy and honoured to have received this award from such a high official of the people. She said she had worked with people of all races, and it was satisfying that her efforts have been recognised.

paul.williams@gleanerjm.com