Strictly Facts: A Guide to Caribbean History and Culture

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  The Hidden Architects Of Reggae And The Women Who Built It 22.07.2026 44Min.

  Send us a text message and tell us your thoughts. Reggae has never been a boys-only story, so why do women keep getting filed under “backup,” “footnote,” or “first female to…”? Mikelah Malcolm from Style and Vibes guest hosts a Breadfruit Media crossover and sits down with me to talk about my dissertation on women in reggae, what pushed me to spend years on the research, and what I found when I went looking for women in the archive. We get into the real mechanics of the reggae industry...
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  Barrel Children And The Stories Caribbean Film Can Hold with Meschida Philip 08.07.2026 52Min.

  Send us a text message and tell us your thoughts. A child grows up learning that love can arrive in a barrel, but comfort cannot. That tension sits at the heart of our conversation with Grenadian director, producer, and creative industry strategist Meschida Phillip, whose documentary work asks what migration costs families long after the plane takes off. We trace how the Grenada Revolution, early separation, and years of “waiting” shaped her sense of connection and pushed her toward filmmakin...
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  What If Caribbean Cuisine Funded Caribbean Futures with Taymer Mason 24.06.2026 49Min.

  Send us a text message and tell us your thoughts. Caribbean food travels the world as flavor, nostalgia, and restaurant culture but what if it also traveled as real economic infrastructure? We’re asking a harder question: how do we move from beloved recipes to Caribbean food systems that reduce import dependence, strengthen food security, and create durable industries across the region. I’m joined by Taymer Mason, a Barbadian food scientist and Caribbean product developer with more than 20 ye...
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  Caribbean Futures Through Creative Power with Alistair Scott 10.06.2026 47Min.

  Send us a text message and tell us your thoughts. Caribbean culture is one of the most copied, quoted, and consumed forces on the planet and yet the Caribbean is still too often treated like a place to extract value from, not a place to build value with. That tension sits at the heart of my conversation with Alistair Scott, founder of the Diaspora Legacy Collective, as we dig into how Caribbean futures can be shaped through renewed connection with Africa and the global African diaspora for Ca...
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  Caribbean American Heritage Month And The Work Beyond Celebration 27.05.2026 8Min.

  Send us a text message and tell us your thoughts. Caribbean culture is everywhere, but visibility is not the same as power. As we mark Caribbean American Heritage Month this June, I want to push past the easy parts of celebration and ask a harder question: what are we building with what we know about our history, politics, and cultural practices? In today's episode, we ground ourselves in Caribbean American Heritage Month's official recognition and why Caribbean identity in the US still figh...
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  *Throwback* How Caribbean Museums Built National Identity with Kevin Farmer 13.05.2026 55Min.

  Send us a text message and tell us your thoughts. Museums don’t just preserve history. They decide which stories become a nation’s memory and which stories get buried under polite silence. I’m joined by Kevin Farmer, Deputy Director of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society, to talk about Caribbean museums as real tools of nation building, cultural heritage, and post-independence identity. We start by tracing the roots of colonial museums and collections built to explain the Caribbean to ...
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  How Colonial Jamaica Turned Obeah Into A Crime with Dr. Katharine Gerbner 29.04.2026 43Min.

  Send us a text message and tell us your thoughts. Obeah has been called superstition, “black magic,” and even a crime but those labels have a history, and that history was built to serve colonial power. We sit down with historian Dr. Katharine Gerbner to trace how African-derived spiritual and healing traditions in Jamaica were deliberately stigmatized through slavery, missionary politics, and law. We follow the chain from a rare 1755 archival reference to the shockwaves of 1760, when Tacky'...
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  The Truth Is A Process And We Still Have To Live With It 15.04.2026 7Min.

  Send us a text message and tell us your thoughts. The strangest thing about the truth is how often it arrives late. A story your elders carried for years gets dismissed as “just talk” until an archive opens, a report drops, a government admits wrongdoing, or scholars finally confirm what communities already knew. When that happens, the past doesn’t simply become clearer. It becomes heavier, more complicated, and harder to tuck away. In today's episode, I offer a reflection on Caribbean histor...
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  *Throwback* How Exile From St. Vincent Shaped Garifuna Identity with Dr. Paul López Oro 01.04.2026 43Min.

  Send us a text message and tell us your thoughts. Today, we reshare our reasoning with Dr. Paul López Oro to trace the Garifuna story across Caribbean history, from St Vincent and the Carib Wars to forced exile in 1797 and the building of communities along the Central America Caribbean coast in Honduras, Belize, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and beyond. Along the way, we wrestle with what it means to be Black and Indigenous at the same time, especially in societies that insist those identities must b...
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  Rethinking Borders, Rethinking Belonging with Drs. Patsy Lewis and Kristen Kolenz 18.03.2026 59Min.

  Send us a text message and tell us your thoughts. Headlines turn migration into a single story about borders and crisis. We open the lens, traveling through the Caribbean and Latin America to reveal routes, identities, and cultural worlds that rarely make it into the frame. Joined by co-editors Dr. Patsy Lewis and Dr. Kristen Kolenz, we share how our new book, Unbordering Migration Studies in the Caribbean and Latin America, brings together scholars and artists to map movement beyond the U.S....
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  Building A Living Archive Of Caribbean Women’s Wisdom 04.03.2026 9Min.

  Send us a text message and tell us your thoughts. What happens when you go searching for the words of Caribbean women—and find silence where there should be an echo? We follow that uneasy question into the kitchens, verandas, classrooms, and studios where wisdom has always lived, then ask why so little of it appears on slides, posters, and timelines. Along the way, we unpack how publishing power, archival choices, and diaspora networks shape which voices become quotable and which remain unnam...
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  Recovering Architects Of The UNIA with Dr. Natanya Duncan Part II 18.02.2026 33Min.

  Send us a text message and tell us your thoughts. A woman signs up 3,000 new members, walks into a meeting she was invited to lead, and is assassinated at the podium. That single moment opens a window into the hidden architecture of a global movement and the women who kept it alive when headlines and historians looked away. We continue our conversation with Dr. Natanya Duncan to explore the life and legacy of Princess Laura Adorkor Kofey and the broader force she represents: efficient womanho...
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  Recovering Architects Of The UNIA with Dr. Natanya Duncan Part I 04.02.2026 43Min.

  Send us a text message and tell us your thoughts. What happens when the archive starts talking back? We sat down with Dr. Natanya Duncan to illuminate the women who built the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) from the ground up and gave the movement its global muscle. From a Kingston porch to Harlem kitchens and London cafés, their labor carried Garveyism across continents while reshaping what Black leadership looked like in the early twentieth century. Along the way, we meet nam...
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  Two Amys, One Movement 21.01.2026 14Min.

  Send us a text message and tell us your thoughts. Think you know the Garvey story? Meet the two Amys who built its backbone. We dive into the lives of Amy Ashwood Garvey and Amy Jacques Garvey, Jamaican visionaries whose organizing, editing, and leadership turned a charismatic vision into a global movement. Their names appear in the margins of many textbooks, but their fingerprints are on every chapter of Garveyism’s rise, reach, and survival. We trace Amy Ashwood’s role as a UNIA co-founder...
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  Five Years, Forward for 2026! 07.01.2026 7Min.

  Send us a text message and tell us your thoughts. We are starting the year with a heart of gratitude and a clear plan for what comes next. We celebrate five years of Strictly Facts by looking at how this community-built project became a classroom, a living archive, and a love letter to Caribbean voices. Along the way, we reflect on the milestones of 2025. We revisit why this space exists: to center Caribbean history as a global story rooted in everyday life. Our growth didn’t come from hype. ...
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  *Throwback* Celebrating the Holidays in the Caribbean 24.12.2025 5Min.

  Send us a text message and tell us your thoughts. Celebrate the holidays with us with a throwback episode as we open a window onto a season where streets become stages, kitchens turn into archives, and every drumbeat and carol carries a story. From the clatter of cowbells in Nassau to the smoky crackle of a roast pig on Christmas Eve, the region’s holidays reveal how history lives in sound, taste, and togetherness. We start with the pulse of festival culture: Junkanoo’s lavish costumes and go...
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  School Hair Codes, Colonial Respectability, And Caribbean Rights with amílcar peter sanatan 10.12.2025 42Min.

  Send us a text message and tell us your thoughts. A school bans “edges,” a graduation blocks braids, a child with locks is told to stay home—on the surface, they’re dress code debates. Look closer and you see a lineage of power: colonial respectability, “imperial cleanliness,” and the policing of Black and Brown bodies through hair. We sit down with artist, educator, and gender rights advocate amilcar sanatan to map how grooming rules took root, why they persist, and what it takes to change t...
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  Reclaiming Caribbean Architecture with Professor Dahlia Nduom 26.11.2025 51Min.

  Send us a text message and tell us your thoughts. A building can be history you can walk through, and in the Caribbean those stories are contested, resilient, and alive. With Professor Dahlia Nduom, we explore how colonial styles, tourist imagery, and community ingenuity have shaped what gets built and what gets erased as we move from great houses to tenement yards, spaces that encode climate logic, kinship, and care. We unpack how imagery once glorified plantations while hiding the homes of ...
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  We Will Rise Again: A Post-Melissa Reflection 12.11.2025 12Min.

  Send us a text message and tell us your thoughts. A storm can level homes, but it also reveals what we stand on. Hurricane Melissa’s record winds and devastating surge tore through Jamaica and neighboring territories, but the story is bigger than wind speed—it’s a living history of language, science, memory, and community that runs through the Caribbean. We trace the roots of “hurricane” to Taino and Kalinago cosmologies, revisit Cuba’s pioneering forecasting under Father Benito Viñez, and co...
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  Saint Vincent and the Grenadines' Three Hundred-Year Fight For Sovereignty with Dr. Garrey Dennie 29.10.2025 45Min.

  Send us a text message and tell us your thoughts. Sacred land, contested memory, and a centuries-long fight for sovereignty, this conversation with Dr. Garrey Dennie traces the deep antiquity of the Kalinago in St. Vincent, their transformation into a maritime powerhouse, and the strategic choices that delayed European domination for generations. Instead of a single “first contact,” we explore two: the catastrophic arrival of Europeans and the liberatory meeting of Kalinago communities with A...