Under the theme “Forward Ever to World-Wide Pan-African Unity!”
Grenada celebrated African Liberation Day (ALD) for the first time since the US invasion in 1983. This joyous occasion was held on Tuesday, 25 May.
African Liberation Day is celebrated annually on May 25th and commemorates the founding of the Organization of African Unity, now African Union, on this day in 1963. It is a public holiday in many countries but not Grenada. Holiday or not, ALD is a worldwide observation on May 25 and was marked in Grenada. Progressive people throughout the world celebrate ALD as a means of assessing progress towards global African liberation, of continental Africans as well as those in its vast diaspora of North & Latin America, the UK, the Caribbean and elsewhere.
The 2021 virtual ALD celebrations was both a Grenadian expression of this global tradition as well as continuing to mark the best legacies of the Grenada Revolution. The Grenada African Liberation Day Organising Committee (GALDOC) welcomed many online participants from across the gobe. In doing so they stated: –
“We recognise the fighting spirit of our African and Caribbean sisters & brothers in their struggle for liberation and we join with them across the globe to celebrate this day.”
ALD – Grenada 2021 video
You can see, download and share the video of ALD – Grenada 2021 here. Compered by Paul Clement the recording shows the rich weave of Grenada’s history, culture and achievements. The brilliant micro-documentaries of filmmaker Martin Felix underscored the informative and wide-ranging presentations of Laurie Lambert, Clinton Hutton and Jacqui McKenzie.
To show the video go to https://www.facebook.com/gemfmca/videos/777631889783828.
Speakers were:
Laurie Lambert
Laurie R. Lambert is an interdisciplinary scholar, working 
at the intersection of literature and history in African Diaspora Studies. She is an associate professor of African and African American Studies at Fordham University. She received her PhD in English and American Literature from New York University in 2013. Her first book, Comrade Sister: Caribbean Feminist Revisions of the Grenada Revolution (University of Virginia Press 2020), examines the gendered implications of political trauma in the literature on Grenada.
The book analyzes how Caribbean women writers use authorship as a means of expressing cultural sovereignty and critiquing the inadequacy of hierarchical, patriarchal, and linear histories of a black radical tradition as they narrate the Grenada Revolution. In so doing, Lambert reads Caribbean literature as a primary site for the excavation of gendered readings of revolution, identifying the marginalized voices of women and girls at multiple unexpected sites of political formation.
Lambert received her BFA in Film Studies from Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada, as well as an MA in English from the University of Toronto. Her research and teaching interests include Black Feminism, Caribbean Literature and History, Black Performance Studies, Literatures and Cultures of American Imperialism, African Diasporic Literature and History, Freedom and Slavery Studies, and Black Radicalism. She is currently the Secretary of the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD). Before joining the faculty at Fordham, Lambert was Assistant Professor of African American and African Studies at the University of California, Davis, and the 2014-2015 Postdoctoral Fellow in Critical Caribbean Studies at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ.
Jacqui McKenzie
Jacqueline (Jacqui) McKenzie is a prominent British human rights lawyer specialising in 
migration, asylum and refugee law. Her legal career encompasses practice in the areas of civil liberties, crime and immigration with solicitors Birnberg Peirce and Partners, and since 2010 running her own immigration consultancy, McKenzie Beute and Pope, having previously spent more than a decade in senior local government roles with responsibility for equalities, community development, communications and urban development.
She is the founder of the Organisation of Migration Advice and Research, which works pro bono with refugees and women who have been trafficked to the UK. McKenzie has won recognition for her work seeking justice for victims of the Windrush scandal that initially gained notoriety in 2018.
Clinton Hutton
Dr. Clinton Hutton is the Director of the Institute of Technological and Educational Research (ITER) at The Mico University College and a retired Professor of Caribbean Political Philosophy, Culture and Aesthetics at the University of the West Indies.
He has produced a huge body of work including The Logic and Historical Significance 
of the Haitian Revolution and the Cosmological Roots of Haitian Freedom. His work has advanced understanding of the Caribbean studies of history and philosophical foundations of enslavement, (kidnapping) and liberation, artistic expression, black self-images and masculinity.
Many have commented on his ‘insightful, broad and deep research and philosophical contributions to the understanding of the Jamaican and Caribbean history, quest for human freedom, equal rights and justice, religious and artistic re-creation of peoplehood, and the assertion of self-hood, agency and dignity of its peoples.”
For further information please contact the Grenada African Liberation Day Organising Committee (GALDOC) via malachydottin50@gmail.com.