Kamau Brathwaite

Lawson Edward Brathwaite was born on 11 May 1930 in Bridgetown, Barbados, the son of Hilton Brathwaite, a warehouse clerk, and Beryl Gill Brathwaite. From this modest colonial household he won his way to Harrison College, and then, on a scholarship, to Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he read history (B.A., 1953) and earned a certificate in education the following year.

From 1955 to 1962 he served as an education officer in the Gold Coast, soon Ghana, and that immersion in West African life reshaped his sense of self. It surfaced in his great trilogy — Rights of Passage (1967), Masks (1968), and Islands (1969) — gathered in 1973 as The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy, which traces the Caribbean person's long search for cultural belonging across Africa and the Americas.

Returning to teach at the University of the West Indies, and completing a doctorate at Sussex in 1968, Brathwaite became a foundational theorist of Caribbean culture. In History of the Voice (1984) he named and championed "nation language," the rooted Creole speech of the ordinary Caribbean voice, insisting it be honoured in poetry and in schools. In 1971 he received the name Kamau in Kenya, and later worked as a professor at New York University.

His honours included the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2006 for Born to Slow Horses. He died on 4 February 2020 in Barbados. May the tides he heard in every line carry his name onward, honoured and unbroken.