Namba Roy

Namba Roy (25 April 1910 – 16 June 1961) was a Jamaican novelist and artist. He was the father of writer and educator Lucinda Roy.

Biography Born Nathan Roy Atkins in 1910 — his birthplace has been given as Kingston, Jamaica, although it is also believed that he may have been born in Accompong, in the hills of St. Elizabeth Parish, where he spent most of his childhood living among the Maroons, descendants of runaway African slaves. Roy's grandfather was his village's traditional master carver, which role was passed on from father to son in subsequent generations. After the death of his father, his mother struggled to bring up four children, and the family was split up, with Roy's older siblings going to relatives while he remained with his mother, at the age of 12 working as an odd-job boy at a school for 14 hours a day, being paid one shilling a week, as he would later recall. and served on munitions ships and oil tankers until 1944, when he was discharged due to illness and disembarked in Britain (Jamaica being still a British colony, Jamaicans were then regarded as British citizens). He later used the African name Namba together with his middle name, first showing his work in London in 1952. In a tribute after his death, his widow Yvonne Roy wrote: "His most tender subject, the mother and her child, he portrayed over and over again, always finding something new and more wonderful as the image took shape, either from beneath his chisel, or appearing in all the vivid colours of his birthplace, from his brush. These subjects were predominantly Christian, presenting the Child Jesus and His Mother as coloured, identifying his people with God—refusing to subscribe to a colour bar of the spirit."

Roy's novel Black Albino was published in 1961, with a foreword by Tom Driberg, who described the story as an "inverted parable of colour prejudice". Roy's other novel, No Black Sparrows, which he had written in the 1950s before Black Albino but for which he had failed to find a publisher, was posthumously published in 1989. who met in 1950,

Namba Roy died in London in June 1961, aged 51.