Carlos Moore (writer)


Carlos Moore is a writer, social researcher, professor and activist, dedicated to African and Afro-American history and culture. Moore holds two doctorates in Human Sciences and Ethnology from the University of Paris, and speaks five languages. At various periods he lived in France, África, United States of America, Brazil and the Caribbean
Moore is widely recognized for his outspokenness against racism, defense of pan-Africanism, his scholarly work and for writing the authorized biography of the Nigerian singer, saxophonist and activist Fela Kuti, Fela, Fela: This Bitch of a Life, which inspired the stage musical Fela!

Biography

Early years

He was born Charles Moore Wedderburn in Central Lugareño, near the town of Nuevitas in Camaguey, Cuba, of working-class Jamaican parents. His biological father, Whitfield Marshall, was from Trinidad and Tobago and his mother, Winifred Rebecca Wedderburn, was from Jamaica. However, until his tenth birthday, Carlos Moore grew up with his mother and stepfather, Victor Moore, also from Jamaica, until the family disintegrated.
In 1958, to escape the civil war and in search of better opportunities, Moore at age fifteen emigrated to New York with his stepfather and siblings. In New York, Carlos Moore lived with his stepfather and his stepmother Gladys King, a native of Costa Rica. He attended high school while being doubly impacted by the Civil Rights movement on the surge in the USA and the struggles for decolonization in Africa. Moore returned to Cuba in 1961, at the height of the revolution, working as a translator in the Cuban Ministries of Communications and after of Foreign Affairs. However, he became unhappy with the way the Fidel Castro's regime was handling matters pertaining to race. Denouncing what he perceived as an attempt by the Cuban government to ignore racism, Moore fell out of favor with the leadership and was imprisoned twice. After taking refuge in the Guinean embassy he fled the island on November 4, 1963 and sought refuge in Egypt and France.

Exile and career

Carlos Moore arrived in Egypt in December 1963 at the age of twenty-one. He  worked for a year with an African liberation movement led by Jonas Savimbi, a Marxist-Trotskyist and pro-Maoist Angolan leader with whom Moore was close during this period One year after his arrival in Egypt, Moore was imprisoned for a month by the immigration authorities of that country for being in an irregular situation After this event, he left Egypt and took refuge in France in 1964, where the Cuban authorities refused him a passport. In France, Moore received an interdisciplinary education at the University of Paris 7, where he earned two doctorates, one in ethnology and the other the prestigious Doctorat d'État in human sciences.
From 1970 to 1984, Moore was active in various professional fields. In Paris, he was a Latin America desk journalist at Agence France-Presse and a political journalist in African affairs for the weekly magazine Jeune Afrique. Moore studied and worked in France until 1974, when he became involved in the initial phase of FESTAC '77 in Lagos, Nigeria. He then moved to Senegal, where, at the invitation of the scientist Cheikh Anta Diop, he lived for several years with his family. Carlos Moore, who was already a friend of Diop’s, became his personal assistant on pan-African projects while also serving him as interpreter/translator. At the time, Cheikh Anta Diop ran the in Dakar, Senegal.
Years later, Moore was a personal consultant for Latin American affairs to the Secretary General of the Organization of African Unity, Dr. Edem Kodjo.
Between 1986 and 1988, Carlos Moore was a visiting professor in the department of sociology at Florida International University. In 1987, he organized the conference "Negritude, Afro Cultures and Ethnicity in the Americas" with the participation of renown intellectuals such as: Aimé Césaire, Maya Angelou, Leopold Senghor, Alex Haley, Victoria Santa Cruz, Rex Nettleford, Lélia Gonzalez Manuel Zapata Olivella, Rex Nettleford, and Abdias do Nascimento. In 1988, Lincoln University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, invited him as Professor of Negritude, Race and Diaspora Studies.
- In the period between 1990 and 1994, Moore taught international relations courses at the University of the Antilles and Guyana, with branches in Martinique, Guadeloupe and Guyana. And from 1996 to 2002, he was a senior lecturer of Latin American affairs at the Institute of International Relations of the University of the West Indies, at Trinidad and Tobago Concurrently, he was a personal consultant on Latin American affairs to the Secretary General of the Caribbean Community, Dr. Edwin Carrington
In 1982, the authorized biography of Nigerian Afrobeat musician Fela Kuti, written by Carlos Moore, was published. Kuti was a personal friend of the writer. Fela Kuti -first published was in 1982 in United Kingdom by Allison and Busby. Since then, the biography has been translated into six languages. The Broadway musical Fela! was inspired by this work, as recognized in the settlement of a copyright dispute over stage production rights.
The 2019 documentary film My Friend Fela, made by Joel Zito Araújo, explores the complexity of Kuti's life "through the eyes and conversations" of Moore.
In recent years, Moore has been living with his family between Brazil and Guadeloupe, writing about global racism, particularly racism in Brazil.

Personal life

Moore's first wife, Shawna, was from the US, and they had a son together, Kimathi. Moore's second wife, Ayeola, whom he married in 1992, is from Guadeloupe.

Selected bibliography