There was a time in singer and screen actor Etta Cameron’s life when she seemed destined for a US-based entertainment career. Born Ettamae Louvita Coakley on Crooked Island in The Bahamas, Cameron moved in 1948, probably aged 14, to Miami, Florida. When her mother died, Cameron became the primary carer for three siblings. The hardship continued through turbulent years in Baltimore and Boston. Experiencing sexual violence, and a broken marriage that left her raising two children while running a career in the entertainment business, Cameron would write in her 2007 autobiography of singing as a source of strength.  She sang in gospel and spiritual choirs, moved later to rhythm ‘n blues, toured the US, Canada and Latin America, took bit parts in film, and worked her way through the Miami night club scene, where she was known, but not yet a star.

Cameron’s breakthrough, but also the turning point in a career that would see her embroiled in Cold War intrigue, came in 1967 with her first European tour. Contracted to appear at a London jazz festival, Etta was recruited via her British manager for further engagements in East Berlin. Her East German adventure would become a five-year sojourn in the socialist German Democratic Republic (GDR). Here Cameron was an overnight success, rising to media stardom with as many as two hundred annual performances. She toured eastern and western Europe, performing with East Germany’s top jazz and pop musicians, and attracting packed audiences to the East German churches that would later become the seedbed of the country’s 1989 peaceful revolution.

Myths abound about the reasons for Etta’s long stay in the GDR, including a supposed lost passport, and a life trapped behind the Berlin Wall. Etta’s daughter Debbie Cameron, herself a celebrated jazz vocalist, confirmed in a 2017 interview that the family in fact enjoyed relative freedom of movement, with the children’s ‘exceptional childhood’ including daily trips across the Berlin Wall to attend school in West Berlin. Etta, meanwhile, moved into screen acting with a cameo appearance in the East German DEFA studio comedy MIT MIR NICHT, MADAM! (Not with me, Madam! Roland Oehme, 1968).

Cameron herself however described her East German years in her autobiography as a ‘vale of tears’. The GDR regime publicly paraded the largely apolitical Cameron as a torchbearer for US Civil Rights and anti-racism. In the Cold War US, by contrast, her reputation was tainted by her Eastern European success. Unsurprisingly then, when Cameron finally left the GDR, she was bound not for North America, but for Denmark. Here she would make a permanent home, setting Danish audiences alight with her phenomenal gospel and jazz voice, and starring in films including the Danish colonial heritage melodrama PETER VON SCHOLTEN (Palle Kjærulff-Schmid, 1987).

Set in the Virgin Islands, this film—a benign portrait of the Danish Governor-General who issued a decree to emancipate slaves in the Danish West Indies in 1848—reproduces what critic Awa Konaté has called the myth of ‘Nordic exceptionalism’: the notion that Denmark may be exempt from complicity in slavery by virtue of its early abolitionist history. Onscreen however, Etta Cameron’s image exudes a power that transcends the film’s myth of white exceptionalism, inviting audiences to renew their acquaintance with a black Bahamian star of exceptional visual luminosity and vocal power. When Etta Cameron died in 2010, her brilliance had been recognised with the award of the Order of Dannebrog, an honour granted in recognition of exceptional achievements in the service of Danish national life. The story remains to be fully written, however, of a star from the Bahamian diaspora who contributed to black musical and screen culture not just in Denmark, but across western, eastern and northern Europe and North America during a scintillating five-decade career.