The friendship lasted until Belafonte’s death in April 2023, a little over a year after Poitier’s own. When Poitier died in January 2022, Belafonte was among those who spoke publicly about what the loss meant. When Belafonte died fourteen months later, he was mourned in part as the last of a generation of Black performers who had together navigated a moment in American history that required of them more than talent alone.
Poitier’s story is not only Poitier’s story. It is also the story of that generation, and the friendship with Belafonte is one of the places where that larger story becomes visible.
## The Bahamas, the Ambassador, and Going Home
In 1997, the government of the Bahamas appointed Sidney Poitier as its ambassador to Japan.
The appointment had a specific resonance that cannot be fully captured by describing it only in official terms. Poitier had left the Bahamas in 1943 as a fifteen-year-old boy fleeing a life that offered him no pathway to what he wanted to become. He had returned, over the decades, as a famous man — as the man who had won the Oscar, who had been a top box-office draw, who was written about in newspapers and featured in retrospectives and treated as a piece of American cultural history. But he had not returned to stay.
The ambassadorship was something different. It was a formal claim of connection between the man and the country he had come from, made by the country itself. The Bahamas, independent since 1973, was saying: this is ours. This man, who was born prematurely in Miami but grew up on Cat Island, who learned to be who he was in a community on a small island with no electricity or running water or movie theaters — he is ours.