A friend called me early on Wednesday morning.

"Did I dream that Barack Obama won the US presidential elections last night?" he asked.

It was real, I replied. Yes, a black man had been elected as President of the United States of America. And the world danced, sang and screamed. Many cried. It was a special moment in history, to be listed among the many special moments both of us have experienced in our lifetimes.

Our memories stretch over the years to a war which was fought 60 years ago in Europe and Africa, and ended in the Pacific with the destruction of two cities by the hydrogen bomb. That war changed Jamaica and the way of our lives. Things we had grown accustomed to, like currants and raisins for the Christmas cakes our mothers baked were sunk to the bottom of the ocean by German submarines. It was a five-year experience no one who lived through it has ever forgotten.

Seven years later, Jamaica was no longer a little insignificant island among a cluster of islands in the Caribbean Sea. Four of our young men defeated the world when they won the 4x400 metres relay at the Helsinki Olympics. There was no television then. The news was first heard by the few who owned radios. Three weeks later, we crowded the cinemas to see this race shown on the screens in black and white.

tears of joy

In subsequent years there were several more special moments. Ten years after Helsinki, the world and his wife came to Jamaica to share our joy when we became an independent nation. More were to follow. In the following 30 years three of our young women were crowned 'Miss World'; and a schoolgirl, Jody-Ann Maxwell won the Scripps Howard Spelling Bee competition in Washington D.C.

We cried again when the Reggae Boyz qualified for the World Cup Soccer finals in France, becoming the first English-speaking Caribbean country to do so as well as being the smallest country with the smallest population to play in this prestigious tournament.

Then at the break of the 20th and 21st centuries, we were again in the world spotlight when Time magazine named Bob Marley's album, Exodus as the best album of the 20th century, and the BBC chose Marley's One Love as the song of the century.

recent memories

More recent memories such as our successes in the field of athletics and Barrington Irvine's solo flight around the world lifted our hearts and made us beam with pride.

And so, although President-elect Barack Obama does not now have any known blood ties with us, he is part of our long ago history. We therefore share his joy and that of the millions of black people in the USA. It is time, too, for them to be identified as black instead of the non sequitur "African-Americans". Here in Jamaica, Chinese descendants have long ceased to be referred to as Chinese-Jamaicans, and we have never called other people Syrian-Jamaicans, Scot-Jamaicans, Irish-Jamaicans or American-Jamaicans.