Kamau Brathwaite

Lawson Edward Brathwaite was born on the eleventh of May 1930 at Bridgetown, Barbados, the son of Hilton Brathwaite — a foreman at the Bridgetown harbour-works — and Beryl Gill Brathwaite, a homemaker. The Brathwaite household was Black middle-class and devoutly Anglican. He was educated at the Harrison College in Bridgetown from 1942 to 1949 and took the Barbados Scholarship for advanced study to Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he read history from 1950 to 1953. He completed the master's at Cambridge in 1954 and the Ph.D. at the University of Sussex in 1968 — the latter under the supervision of the historian Asa Briggs.

He served the Ministry of Education of Ghana as an education officer from 1955 to 1962 in the Volta River and Kumasi districts — the formative period of his intellectual life. The Ghana experience produced his subsequent commitment to the African inheritance of Caribbean culture as the principal interpretive frame of his historical and poetic work. He took the African name Kamau in 1971 at the suggestion of the elder Mbiyu Koinange of Kenya.

He joined the History Department of the University of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica, in 1962 and remained on the Mona faculty for the following thirty years. He published the first volume of his poetic Arrivants trilogy — Rights of Passage — in 1967, the second Masks in 1968, and the third Islands in 1969. The trilogy — drawing the Atlantic-slave-trade journey and the African inheritance of Caribbean cultural life — established him as the principal poetic voice of the Caribbean of his generation alongside Derek Walcott (placed in this archive).

He founded the Caribbean Artists Movement in London in 1966 with the Trinidadian historian John La Rose and the Jamaican novelist Andrew Salkey (placed in this archive). The CAM through the late 1960s and 1970s organised the principal London-based Caribbean cultural-and-political infrastructure of the period.

His decisive theoretical contribution was the concept of nation language — the systematic recognition of Caribbean Creole as a serious literary and intellectual medium — developed in the Edinburgh University Lectures of 1979 and published as History of the Voice in 1984.

He died at Bridgetown on the fourth of February 2020, at eighty-nine.

He is honored here as the author of the Arrivants and the theorist of nation language.