The University of the West Indies will this year confer a record 16 honorary degrees on persons ranging from an Ashanti king to a Queen's Counsel at its graduation exercises in October and November.

Six conferrals will be made by the Mona campus in Jamaica, and five each at the Cave Hill and St Augustine branches in Barbados and Trinidad, respectively.

Jamaican honourees

Among the honourees are Jamaican entrepreneurs and philanthropists Douglas Orane and Michael Lee Chin, and Roderick Rainford, a former governor of the Bank of Jamaica.

Also to be recognised at Mona are Havelock Brewster, Dame Karlene C. Davis and Gilbert Passos Gil Moreira, Brazil's minister of culture.

An engineer by profession, Orane, head of the food and financial super GraceKennedy Group and director of The Gleaner Company, will also receive an LLD.

Lee Chin, a billionaire business-man with empires in both Canada and Jamaica, will also receive a Doctor of Laws degree.

Another Jamaican, Dame Karlene C. Davis, who lives in Britain, will be conferred with the Doctor of Sciences degree for her contribution to midwifery, education and development.

Dame Karlene has led the United Kingdom's Royal College of Midwives for more than a decade. She is currently president of the International Confederation of Midwives.

Other awardees

Other awardees throughout the UWI campuses will be the Baroness Scotland of Asthal; England's first female attorney general; the Asantehene, Otumfuo Osei Tutu II, king of Ghana; Barbadian physicist, Dr Cardinal Warde; Englishman Sir Peter Moores, visual arts educator and philanthropist; Barbadian entrepreneur, Dodridge Miller; Angela Cropper, an environ-mentalist; and Canadian professor, Kari Polanyi Levitt.

Rounding out the group are Kynaston McShine, Trinidadian curator; civil rights leader and Bahamas' seventh governor general, Arthur D. Hanna; and Leroy Calliste, the Trinidadian calyp-sonian known as 'The Black Stalin'.