October 17, 2008
“THE BRONZE WOMAN” UNVEILED
The 3m (10ft) high Bronze Woman statue of a woman holding a baby has been installed in Stockwell Memorial Garden, south London.
The anonymous figure is based on a poem of the same name by Guyana-born Cecile Nobrega, who lives in Stockwell.
The statue comes after a 10-year-long campaign by Ms Nobrega.
Olmec, a community investment foundation, raised £84,000 funding and found the sculptors and a location for the statue.
The statue was unveiled by a “circle” of women of Caribbean origin including artist Anissa-Jane, Baroness Rosalind Howells OBE and Music of Black Origin (MOBO) Awards founder Kanya King.
Windrush anniversary
An initial model of the statue was first designed by sculptor Ian Walters, who also created the Nelson Mandela statue in Parliament Square in 2005.
Following his death in August 2006 the project was completed by Aleix Barbat, a final year sculpture student at Heatherley’s School of Fine Art in London.
Olmec director Tanzeem Ahmed said the monument was “a tribute to the diverse communities that make up British society and a symbol of the potential of women everywhere”.
The installation of the statue marks the 60th anniversary of the arrival of the Empire Windrush ship to Britain carrying 500 West Indian immigrants, and the 200th anniversary of the end of the transatlantic slave trade.
Cecile Nobrega was born Cecile Burgan. She is the daughter of the late Canon William Granville Burgan and Imelda Burgan. Cecile grew up in Buxton village, East Coast Demerara, British Guiana ( now Guyana), where her father was the Canon of St. Augustine’s Anglican Church for a number of years, until he was transferred to St. Paul’s Anglican Church in Plaisance, East Coast Demerara in the early 1950’s.
Cecile Burgan is an educator, writer and poet and the author of a poem “The Bronze Woman”, which inspired her to request funds to build a statue in the honour of women, especially those who were shipped from Africa in the days of slavery and who were the bulwark of the family created in the new world under the yoke of forced labour. She has worked tirelessly on this project for some fifteen years and now it has become a reality as she approaches her 90th birthday.
You can visit her website at: http://www.bronzewoman.org.uk
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