‘Marcus Garvey returning to Africa on the Black Star Line’

This lantern was photographed in the grounds of the Youyi Building where people came to admire the lanterns on the morning after the 1993 Lantern Parade. It depicts a ship carrying the huge, seated figure of Marcus Garvey accompanied by the busts of four companions mounted on poles. Garvey was a Jamaican political activist. A black nationalist and Pan-Africanist, his ideas were influential in the Rastafari movement to which many members of Mandela Youth Organisation (the club that built this lantern) belonged. In 1919 he became President of the Black Star Line shipping and passenger company, designed to facilitate African-American migration to Liberia.