Antigua’s highest peak, known by islanders as Boggy Peak, will change its name to Mount Obama on August 4th, Barack Obama’s birthday. Last year, after the island’s people wore Barack Obama hats, shirts and buttons to promote Obama’s presidential bid, Antigua’s prime minister, Winston Baldwin Spencer, had the idea of changing the peak’s name in honor of the newly-elected president. Now preparations are underway for next week’s ceremony.
Among the performers invited to participate in the ceremony is Constance Blaize-Shorter, an Antiguan-born resident of New Port Richey, in the Tampa area of Florida, where she owns the Temple Terrace Dance Studio. Each time she performs, Constance Blaize-Shorter explained to the ST Petersburg Times, she tries to take her audience on a journey. With movement, she says, comes a story. Her performance for the dedication ceremony will tell the story of Mount Obama. “Sometime before 1834, people enslaved on the sugar plantation revolted and successfully hid on Boggy Peak,” said Blaize-Shorter. Her father, Rupert Blaize, a singer and musician who has been an entertainer for more than 40 years, was asked to write a song for the event. He, in turn, invited his daughter and her troupe, the Blaize Ensemble Dancers, to dance to it in a video to promote the renaming. “I’m excited,” said dancer Vanessa Hardy, 29. “I don’t know a lot about Antigua, but a lot of people have viewed (Obama’s) election as progress, and for it to reach outside of our borders, I think that’s significant.”
Blaize hopes the event makes global headlines. “We believe this is a way of taking Antigua out to the rest of the world,” he said. “We are the only country in the world with a Mount Obama. … Every time a visitor goes by Mount Obama, they will remember the achievement of black folks,” he said. “Mount Obama is a symbol of hope.”
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Photo: Michael C. Weimar for the St. Petersburg Times
