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The Caribbean Broadcasting Hall of Fame was inaugurated by the Caribbean Broadcasting
Union to honor eminent achievement in radio and television arts and industry.
Induction into the Caribbean Broadcasting Hall of Fame
July 1996, in Dominica.
CITATION
For more than a generation, yours has been the most respected name in the annals of Caribbean Broadcasting.
That is only as it should be, for you are this region’s supreme exponent of the art
of broadcasting management -
You fell in love with radio when you were only 16 and devoted your early life to elevating that medium in your native land to standards never since attained. Your mastery of language and technique, your professional discipline, transformed your every broadcast into a work of art.
But it was as manager and leader that you rose to eminence. The cavalcade of broadcasting talent you spawned and motivated in that golden age of radio in Guyana has marched on to endow the region and the world.
You have said that Guyana was where you were born, but the entire Caribbean is your home. This you so amply demonstrated when, as UNESCO’s first Communication Adviser in the region, you mobilized international resources and used your outstanding expertise in implementing scores of media development projects to benefit all our countries.
Throughout the Caribbean, you bonded with broadcasting stations, large and small, elevated them to new heights and became part of them. You also served on the Boards of CANA and CBU, lectured at CARIMAC, and guided these three regional organizations through crucial stages of their growth.
Since retiring from UNESCO, you have never ceased to give liberally from your vast reservoir of knowledge and experience to the cause of regional communication. Your counsel is sought after and followed by governments and communication institutions throughout the Caribbean and Latin America. Broadcasters, young and old, look up to you as their caring friend and mentor. We at the CBU continue to be enriched by your wisdom and diplomacy.
From Belize in the north to Suriname in the south, the name of Rafiq Khan is legend. You were meant for the ages. And so, in the names of broadcasters, past, present and future, to whom you have been and will continue to be an inspiration and a role model, we open wide the portals of the Caribbean Broadcasting Hall of Fame and bid you enter.
HUGH CHOLMONDELEY
Induction into the Caribbean Broadcasting Hall of Fame
July 1996, in Dominica
CITATION
You are the master-
The gift of innovation was always within you. Consider your beginnings in broadcasting
in Guyana, the country of your birth -
But yours was a talent that could not be contained by narrow geographical boundaries. You soon set your sights on the Caribbean, yearning to develop collaborative arrangements among our radio and television stations. So you went knocking on the doors of broadcasters in every country of the region until, through your missionary zeal, the CBU was formed.
Under your leadership, the CBU found its feet and spread its wings. You spearheaded
co-
By then, your communication skills and your unique abilities as an organization builder were being employed by UNESCO and UNDP in the formation of CANA and CARIMAC. Still later, you rose to positions of regional prominence in both of those international agencies. In more recent times, you have served with great distinction in U.N. relief and rehabilitation programmes in the troubled countries of Africa.
It is, however, for your seminal contributions to the development of regional broadcasting that we honour you today. Yours was a driving mission wedded to a burning vision. You grabbed ideas and dragged them into the light of day. One such idea was the Caribbean Broadcasting Union.
Welcome, Hugh Cholmondeley, Visionary Builder, Founding Father of the CBU, to your rightful place in the Caribbean Broadcasting Hall of Fame.
Induction into the Caribbean Broadcasting Hall of Fame
August 1997, in Suriname
CITATION
If the true measure of broadcasting as a public service is the extent to
which it imbues audiences with a sense of community and a spirit of outreach to the
least fortunate, then you are this region’s great pioneer of Public Service Broadcasting
and its greatest exponent.
Your community instincts were always at work, even in the 1930’s when, as a callow youth armed with a mandolin and a winsome voice, you made your first tentative forays into the still virgin territory of radio in your native land, the British Guiana of yore.
As the years passed, whether you played or sang or ran talent shows or did general announcing, you somehow managed to engage your listeners in charitable causes. Eventually in 1953, you launched the Radio Demerara Needy Children’s Fund which, onto this day, brings sustenance and comfort to thousands of destitute children and families.
That dedication, that talent, nurtured in the land of your birth, came into full flowering in the land of your adoption, Barbados, where you have lived since 1963. You took Bajans into your warm embrace, and they hugged you right back. The Rediffusion Needy Children’s Fund became a national institution. And so did you.
For the way you used radio to serve the community, you deserve only the highest encomiums,
but let us applaud too your other seminal works in the evolution of broadcasting
in the Caribbean -
For more than two generations, you strove to bring broadcasting into the community and the community into broadcasting. In the process, you nourished the one and elevated the other. In these days when we as broadcasters all too often lose sight of our higher purpose, the example of your life will surely remind us of the best that we can be.
And so, in the hope that you continue to be not only our inspiration but our conscience,
we, the fraternity of regional broadcasters, welcome you, Olga Lopes-
CITATIONS FROM THE
CARIBBEAN BROADCASTING HALL OF FAME