No other Jamaican has had such a profound international impact as Marcus Garvey has. In an era that treated the idea of black inferiority almost as a given fact, Garvey shouted "No!" in a voice heard across the planet. In Martin Luther King Jr's words, Garvey was "the first man, on a mass scale, to give millions of Negroes a sense of dignity and destiny ... . He gave us a sense of personhood, a sense of manhood, a sense of somebodiness."

Bob Nesta Marley is the most famous figure this country has produced. (Though Usain Bolt might be usurping him in places like China and India.) Mention Jamaica, and foreigners who scarcely know in which hemisphere the country is located will cry in recognition 'Bob Marley!'.

Louise 'Miss Lou' Bennett-Coverley is the most universally loved personality this nation has ever produced or likely will ever produce, engendering unabashed feelings of pride and affection in Jamaicans of all ages, colours, classes and creeds. For over 50 years, she tirelessly championed Jamaican folk customs on stage, radio and television. Miss Lou is also the most popular poet in this island's history, outselling all others put together.

In 1938, demonstrations swept across the island. The worldwide depression had made the normally hard life of the Jamaican peasant often intolerable.

For Norman Manley, achievement of excellence was the norm; he was a world-class high-school athlete, Rhodes Scholar, decorated World War I military hero, prize man of Gray's Inn, acknowledged as the Caribbean's finest legal mind, and the first Jamaican to appear before the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council.

The outstanding leader of the 1831 Christmas slave revolt, often referred to as the ‘Baptist War’ because of the denomination of most participants, was Deacon Samuel ‘Daddy’ Sharpe. Wesleyan missionary Henry Bleby described him as the most remarkable and intelligent slave he had ever met.

MARY JANE Grant was born in Kingston in 1805 to a Scottish army officer and a free Creole woman. Her mother ran the Kingston hotel Blundell Hall at 7 East Street, and was also a 'doctress' versed in the use of African herbal remedies, a knowledge she passed on to her daughter.

BY 1865, the American civil war and a severe drought had dramatically increased food costs in Jamaica, while collapsing sugar prices had cut estate wages and made work scarce.

WHEN THE white English missionary, William Knibb, was posthumously awarded the Order of Merit in 1988, Devon Dick wrote: "No other person of his era demonstrated such faith in the prowess of the black people."

WHY 'TOP 10 greatest Jamaicans'? Well, why not? Fifty years of Independence is a long enough time to reach some agreement about which of this country's sons and daughters have fought for justice and equality, and giving Jamaicans pride in themselves as a people. And is this not a reasonable definition of greatness?