Barbara Blake Hannah

Barbara Makeda Blake-Hannah (born 5 June 1941) is a Jamaican author and journalist known for her promotion of Rastafari culture and history. She is also a politician, filmmaker, festival organiser and cultural consultant. She was one of the first black people to be an on-camera reporter and interviewer on British television when, in 1968, she was employed by Thames Television's evening news programme Today. Hannah was sacked because viewers complained about having a black woman on screen. She later returned to Jamaica and was an independent senator in the Parliament of Jamaica from 1984 to 1987.

She has written several books, including a 1981 account of the Rastafarian religion (Rastafari – The New Creation, "the first book on the religion written by a practising member"), and produced several more films, including a documentary for Britain's Channel 4, Race, Rhetoric, Rastafari (1982).

Known for her promotion of Rastafari culture and history, she currently serves as executive director of the Jamaica Film Academy, which organises the Reggae Film Festival.

In April 2020, Blake-Hannah gave an interview to Bryan Knight's Tell A Friend podcast, where she candidly spoke about her experience working in Britain. She spoke of the racism prevalent at the time and her journey to black consciousness.

The British media periodical Press Gazette launched the "Barbara Blake-Hannah Prize" in 2020 to recognise emerging talented journalists from minority backgrounds.

She has been active in the call for reparations for slavery. In 2001, she established the Jamaica Reparations Movement after returning from the UN-backed World Conference Against Racism where the issue of reparations had been debated. However, in 2022, she said: "After seven years of trying to drum up support for the J.A.R.M. [Jamaican Reparations Movement]...I handed the work over to the government. Twenty years later, hardly one of the UN’s 19 Forms of Reparations have been implemented by any country, least of all Britain."