Donisha Prendergast — Using art and activism from Jamaica to the world

BY SELINA McCALLUM

This empowering young woman comes from a family of many accomplishments that have impacted millions of people around the world.

Donisha Prendergast is the granddaughter of Bob Marley, the famous Jamaican singer and songwriter, but she has made a strong and independent legacy for herself in her own right.

Prendergast was born and raised in Jamaica and started acting in theatre at the age of 17.

“People always told me how dramatic I was,” she laughs. “So, I wanted to make use of that, and I really enjoyed the stage because I grew up on the stage.”

From the time Prendergast was a little girl, she was touring all over the world with her family. Her mother, Sharon Marley, is also a Jamaican singer. She was in the group Ziggy Marley and the Melody Makers along with her younger sister and brothers.

“I saw how to use the stage as a platform to make social impact, and how many emotions were associated with performance and I really enjoyed that,” said Prendergast.

The budding actress ended up getting the role in a production without telling her family and missed many classes for rehearsals. It wasn’t until the PR campaign started to promote the show for audiences to come see, that she told her parents she was in a play.

“At first they were very distraught because they wanted me to finish school,” said Prendergast.

But her mother came around.

“My mom has always been very supportive, because she knows that I am a very free-spirit. When the show opened up, my mother was at every show for the first two months, every single night,” said Prendergast.

Being part of the Jamaican production also helped Prendergast blossom into her other talents. She is also a dancer, poet and model, but above all, she is a storyteller.

After acting in Jamaica for four years almost every single day, Prendergast went to Howard University in Washington, DC.

“From being on stage in Jamaica six days a week, I went to being on stage for an hour and a half once a week for a class. A lot of the characters that we were encouraged to audition for were black American characters and African American characters from the deep south,” said Prendergast.

The Jamaican actress felt she wanted to do more stories of her people and her experience.

This was around the same time her grandmother, Rita Marley, invited her to become a Youth Ambassador for the Africa Unite Youth Symposiums.

“My grandma had started doing this series called Africa Unite where she went to different parts of Africa every year starting with Ethiopia in 2005, Ghana in 2006 and South Africa in 2007. I went with her every year,” said Pendergast.

In 2007 she was asked to speak on a panel. Although she had been on a stage many times before, being on this stage was different. This is when she found her calling to also be an advocate.

“I found a different part of my voice. I found a different way to express myself that I didn’t know that even I had,” said Prendergast.

She grew to become miserable at Howard and left to be with her family in Miami without completing her degree there. Instead, she enrolled in film school in Miami.

“I wanted to do something more. I wanted to go into film because I felt it was important to start writing our story. There’s a quote that I learned that said, “Until the lion learns to tell his own story, the tale of the hunt, will always glorify the hunter,” said Prendergast.

In the fight for human rights, she wants the world to know that it wasn’t easy for the ‘hunter’, that she is fighting hard against the hunter. Since then, her works as a speaker and cultural ambassador have taken her through much of the Caribbean, Europe, Africa and North America.

In between the three-year film program, Prendergast completed a documentary called RasTa… A Soul’s Journey, a Canadian feature length documentary which took her to eight countries including Israel, Ethiopia, India and South Africa as a guide, to seek out the roots and evolution of RasTafari. She had one more semester to complete but didn’t end up going back.

“It was hard for me to go back to school when there was so much life happening in the world. The earth became my classroom,” said Prendergast. “I became really intent on being a better student and being a better teacher.”

Pendergast spends her time in Canadian and American classrooms, lecturing on the same stages as Magic Johnson, Desmond Tutu and Martin Luther King Jr III and speaking to audiences of up to 15,000 young people about the power of one love and activism for social healing.

She is currently studying film at Ryerson University on a scholarship and is expected to graduate this semester. Prendergast has been backstage on tour, on stage for theatre, and on stage for public speaking, but this is a stage that no one in her family has crossed before.

“First of all, graduating from the class Covid 2020 is quite interesting because I don’t even know if we’re going to be having a graduation ceremony. One of the reasons I did take this scholarship to go back to school was because I wanted to get a photo of me graduating and my mom, and my dad, and my grandma being there, because I don’t have that. Coming from a family of artists, a lot of them didn’t get to finish school,” said Prendergast.

“I did it, I defied the odds. I did all of the activism, I travelled, I spoke to people, I helped heal people, I helped to carry stories and still go back to school,” said Prendergast.

Alongside other founding directors of Manifesto Jamaica, Prendergast commitment to global community work has special focus on her healing works in Jamaica, especially with the youth of Faces of Tivoli Gardens Youth Organization, who she has been mentoring since the violent incursion of May 2010 among many other projects. Pendergast and her team created a healing garden with herbs and invited the community to come out, to plant and establish a sense of new growth.

“I didn’t live there, I couldn’t represent their story, but what I could do was empower the young people to learn how to make change in their community, sustainable change, like creating programs and finding funding or partners,” said Prendergast.

In addition, as a healer and community organizer she built a school for girls in the Mara Masaai region in Kenya with Free the Children. Pendergast has also marched through the snow for justice with the Idle No More movement and the Indigenous youth and ancient elders of Canada.

She encourages artists of all kind to use their platform for good and to impact political change.

“What are we doing as artists today? The thousands of people that we’re singing to on these stages, are we just singing to them to make sure that we sell tickets? Or is the message right, and righteous and empowering greater humanity in the world? What is the point of our art today?” said Prendergast.