Growing Out

Barbara Blake Hannah is a Jamaican author, journalist, filmmaker and cultural consultant. She trained as a journalist, then emigrated to London and worked as a PR Executive for the Jamaica Tourist Board and Government. She became the first Black TV journalist in the UK in 1968, starring in TV programmes 'TODAY with Eammon Andrews' and 'ATV TODAY', and working as a producer on BBC-TV's 'MAN ALIVE'. In 1972 she returned to Jamaica as a PR Officer for the first Jamaican film "The Harder They Come" and continued writing articles and books, becoming a Rastafari and articulate campaigner for acceptance of the religion. In 1984 she was appointed an Independent Opposition Senator, the first Rastafari to sit in the Jamaican Parliament. In 2001, she served as a member of the Jamaican delegation to the UN World Conference Against Racism (WCAR) in Durban, South Africa, where she was appointed a member of the special plenary on Reparations, after which she established the Jamaica Reparations Movement that led to the establishment of the government's Parliamentary Commission on Reparations (2008). She presently serves as Cultural Liaison to the Jamaican Minister of Culture, Gender, Entertainment & Sport, and continues to work in the film industry.