My remarks on receiving the National Association of Black Journalists' Percy Qoboza Foreign Journalist Award at the NABJ Convention and Career Fair, New Orleans, USA, August 11, 2017
Receiving
this award is, for me, one of the more humbling experiences of my professional
life. There are few greater tributes a journalist can receive to match the
recognition of his or her peers.
I come
before you as a Caribbean person, from a small twin-island state, whose
ancestry finds roots on the shores of more than one continent. People who came either
through force, subterfuge or by choice to a new home we now call our own.
I also
come from a land of the freed engaged in a perpetual struggle to become the
land of the free. Each step of the way confronting the compulsion, through
post-colonial habit, to deny ourselves the freedom we have earned as human
beings making our way in a vast universe. And in the process reframing Du Bois’s
rhetorical question: “How does it feel to be a problem?”
For
the Caribbean journalist, our story is as much an explanation of ‘why’ things
happen as it is an honest declaration of ‘what’ we confront as a people – both
as the subjects and objects of history. For this reason, journalism in all its convergent
manifestations and as the first draft of our story, is a singularly important
imperative of our time and a free press one of our most valuable assets.
It
is however amazing that as a people whose history emerges from institutionalised
coercion, violence and bondage, that the freedom cry in the Caribbean should so
tragically roam the social and political wilderness.
This
is the challenge my organisation, the ACM, engaged, when we launched 16 years
ago, with a message of freedom and a commitment to work harder to claim the
power it provides to our people.
Today,
my own contribution to this cause has brought me here, as if in sacred
communion with peers, brothers and sisters and comrades. “Tell of my love to
the islands,” the hymnist writes, “tell it everywhere.”
I
cherish this moment to tell of my love for the islands and I vow to continue
telling it everywhere.
Thank
you for this great honour.
