Strictly Facts: A Guide to Caribbean History and Culture

Building A Living Archive Of Caribbean Women’s Wisdom

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 unnamed, even as their ideas guide our lives.We explore proverbs like every mickle mek a muckle and one one coco full basket as distilled philosophies of patience, accumulation, and community care. These are not folk extras; they are intellectual traditions forged through scarcity, migration, and resistance. We contrast the global prominence of figures like Marcus Garvey or Audre Lorde with the many Caribbean women whose insights travel orally or locally and rarely get tagged to a name. Then we turn to a practical solution: building a living archive by treating our conversations with scholars, artists, and educators as citable sources. When a phrase reframes history, names a power dynamic, or offers a tool for survival, we capture it, attribute it, and pass it on.Together we commit to a simple practice with big stakes: cite women’s words. Citation is care, visibility, and lineage—a way to ensure that students, educators, and community organizers can trace ideas back to the women who shaped them. We close with an open invitation: share the quote by a Caribbean woman you live by, whether it came from a poet, a professor, a musician, a grandmother, or a guest on the show. Tag us and tell us what it means to you, and we’ll amplify it so those voices stay present in our feeds, our classrooms, and our futures.If this conversation resonates, follow the show, share it with a friend who loves Caribbean history and culture, and leave a review so more listeners can find these voices. Your citation, your share, and your story help build the archive.Support the showConnect with Strictly Facts - Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | LinkedIn | YouTube | Website Looking to read more about the topics covered in this episode? Subscribe to the newsletter at www.strictlyfactspod.com to get the Strictly Facts Syllabus to your email!Want to Support Strictly Facts? Rate & Leave a Review on your favorite platform Share this episode with someone or online and tag us Send us a DM or voice note to have your thoughts featured on an upcoming episode Donate to help us continue empowering listeners with Caribbean history and education Produced by Breadfruit Media

Recovering Architects Of The UNIA with Dr. Natanya Duncan Part II

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 womanhood inside the Universal Negro Improvement Association. We unpack how Kofey leveraged overlapping memberships across Black political organizations to grow the UNIA at scale, and why her ability to mobilize made her both indispensable and threatening. Dr. Duncan traces archival breadcrumbs to show how debates about Kofey’s origins obscured the central question: who shot her, and what does that reveal about power, loyalty, and gender in mass movements?We broaden the lens to spotlight women like Henrietta Vinton Davis who signed stock certificates and underwrote the Black Star Line, illustrating how everyday decisions about money, mutual aid, and accountability built real infrastructure. This isn’t just civil rights history; it’s a blueprint for Black autonomy and human rights that shaped the tactics of later movements and still resonates now. Tune in, rethink the narrative, and help surface the names and questions that deserve daylight. City University of New York Associate Professor of History, Dr. Natanya Duncan's research and teaching focuses on global freedom movements of the 20th and 21st Century. Duncan’s research interest includes constructions of identity and nation building amongst women of color; migrations; color and class in Diasporic communities; and the engagements of intellectuals throughout the African Diaspora. Her book, An Efficient Womanhood: Women and the Making of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, (University of North Carolina Press 2025) focuses on the distinct activist strategies in-acted by women in the UNIA, which Duncan calls an efficient womanhood. Following the ways women in the UNIA scripted their own understanding of Pan Africanism, Black Nationalism and constructions of Diasporic Blackness, the work traces the blending of nationalist and gendered concerns amongst known and lesser known Garveyite women. Support the showConnect with Strictly Facts - Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | LinkedIn | YouTube | Website Looking to read more about the topics covered in this episode? Subscribe to the newsletter at www.strictlyfactspod.com to get the Strictly Facts Syllabus to your email!Want to Support Strictly Facts? Rate & Leave a Review on your favorite platform Share this episode with someone or online and tag us Send us a DM or voice note to have your thoughts featured on an upcoming episode Donate to help us continue empowering listeners with Caribbean history and education Produced by Breadfruit Media

Recovering Architects Of The UNIA with Dr. Natanya Duncan Part I

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 names that deserve the spotlight: Henrietta Vinton Davis, Laura Kofey, and especially the Two Amys. Amy Ashwood Garvey co-founded the UNIA and helped the Negro World reach readers far beyond Harlem. Amy Jacques Garvey transformed the paper’s women’s page into a political and strategic forum, setting the tone for a movement that saw home life and nation building as the same fight.Threaded through the conversation is “efficient womanhood,” a term recovered in the archive that captures how UNIA women blended gender demands with nationalist goals as one practical program. We explore how public stance and private negotiation worked in tandem, why women printed their addresses and left a paper trail of property, and how their coalitions nurtured anticolonial leadership. This is a story of logistics, courage, and care: parades organized, ledgers balanced, alliances brokered, and a movement sustained in the face of surveillance and erasure.Editor's Note: At 03:14, Dr. Duncan meant to refer to Dr. Patrick E. Bryan instead of "Patrick Henry."City University of New York Associate Professor of History, Dr. Natanya Duncan's research and teaching focuses on global freedom movements of the 20th and 21st Century. Duncan’s research interest includes constructions of identity and nation building amongst women of color; migrations; color and class in Diasporic communities; and the engagements of intellectuals throughout the African Diaspora. Her book, An Efficient Womanhood: Women and the Making of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, (University of North Carolina Press 2025) focuses on the distinct activist strategies in-acted by women in the UNIA, which Duncan calls an efficient womanhood. Following the ways women in the UNIA scripted their own understanding of Pan Africanism, Black Nationalism and constructions of Diasporic Blackness, the work traces the blendiSupport the showConnect with Strictly Facts - Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | LinkedIn | YouTube | Website Looking to read more about the topics covered in this episode? Subscribe to the newsletter at www.strictlyfactspod.com to get the Strictly Facts Syllabus to your email!Want to Support Strictly Facts? Rate & Leave a Review on your favorite platform Share this episode with someone or online and tag us Send us a DM or voice note to have your thoughts featured on an upcoming episode Donate to help us continue empowering listeners with Caribbean history and education Produced by Breadfruit Media

Two Amys, One Movement

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, strategist, and early architect who helped design the organization’s infrastructure in Jamaica and nurtured its international ambitions. Her work exemplifies a transatlantic Caribbean feminism rooted in institution-building and political education, long before the term became common. We then spotlight Amy Jacques, a journalist and editor whose stewardship during Garvey’s imprisonment kept the movement alive. She edited The Negro World, wrote speeches, managed correspondence, and articulated a bold vision for women’s leadership in Black liberation. By editing and publishing The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, she preserved a scattered archive and ensured that future generations could study, adapt, and debate Garveyism. Along the way, we acknowledge the human complexity—yes, Marcus married two Amys—and use that irony to open the door to deeper truths: movements are made by people with egos, contradictions, humor, and heart. Re-centering these women shifts how we measure impact, highlighting the editors, organizers, archivists, and educators who keep ideas moving across borders and time. If you’ve only heard the headline, this conversation invites you into the story behind it. If this resonated, follow the show, share it with a friend, and leave a review so more listeners can discover the women who built Garveyism. What other hidden architects of history should we feature next?Support the showConnect with Strictly Facts - Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | LinkedIn | YouTube | Website Looking to read more about the topics covered in this episode? Subscribe to the newsletter at www.strictlyfactspod.com to get the Strictly Facts Syllabus to your email!Want to Support Strictly Facts? Rate & Leave a Review on your favorite platform Share this episode with someone or online and tag us Send us a DM or voice note to have your thoughts featured on an upcoming episode Donate to help us continue empowering listeners with Caribbean history and education Produced by Breadfruit Media

Five Years, Forward for 2026!

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. It came from trust—the emails, classroom shares, kind reviews, and the steady support of a diaspora that knows the value of telling our own stories.Now we turn the mic to you. Year five is a year-long celebration shaped by listener ideas. Send us your hopes and questions. Tell us what you want to learn, who should join us, and how this show can keep serving the region and its global family. We’ll keep honoring the past, standing in the present, and building a more complete record of Caribbean life together.Support the showConnect with Strictly Facts - Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | LinkedIn | YouTube | Website Looking to read more about the topics covered in this episode? Subscribe to the newsletter at www.strictlyfactspod.com to get the Strictly Facts Syllabus to your email!Want to Support Strictly Facts? Rate & Leave a Review on your favorite platform Share this episode with someone or online and tag us Send us a DM or voice note to have your thoughts featured on an upcoming episode Donate to help us continue empowering listeners with Caribbean history and education Produced by Breadfruit Media