Lynette Yvonne Joseph Bani

Lynette “Bounkie” Yvonne Joseph Bani passed away peacefully at her private care home residence In Vancouver, BC surrounded by love. Lynette was 88 years 8 months old when she transitioned from her earthy journey, perhaps with some providence, at 8:18 pm on January 8, 2025

Lynette was born on Friday May 29, 1936, in Georgetown Guyana to Stephanie and Adolphus Joseph, the fifth child among seventeen siblings. At a young age she demonstrated a gift for the arts, winning a singing competition on Radio Demerara at the encouragement of her mother. Her artistic talent shone brightest in the garment trade and she started a successful sewing business out of her family home at 1 Laing Avenue where her designs were all the rage among her contemporaries, giving her an early taste of personal accomplishment.

Despite the circumstances in her home country, and the personal challenges and heartbreak she experienced in her younger years, Lynette held fast to her dream of improving the conditions of her own life, and the lives of the people in her large family. She was accepted into the Canadian Domestic Worker Scheme and moved from Guyana to Montreal, Canada on July 4, 1962, on her own in a new country at the tender age 26. While working days under sometimes harsh conditions, Lynette put herself through design school at night and completed a diploma at Montreal’s Fashion Arts Academy thus launching her career in the Canadian garment trade. It was in Montreal that she started her family, marrying Evans Allen and having her two sons there, Ezra and Stephen.

When her marriage ended, and after a successful first job at Pert Knitting, the leading manufacture of children’s clothing in Canada at the time, Lynette took a job at Norfolk Knitters and moved to Port Dover, Ontario. There she met Wilhelm Bansbach with whom she had her daughter Stephanie. When Norfolk Knitters closed their manufacturing division, Lynette decided to open her first of many boutiques featuring her own designs and offering custom dressmaking. She went on to own several more boutiques over the years as well as working for top clothing manufacturers in Canada including Joseph Ribkoff and Adidas in Toronto, and Sun Ice in Calgary Alberta.

Throughout her life, Lynette held fast to her religious upbringing and her search for the deeper meaning in life led her to join different denominations and faith groups over the years. Her commitment to spiritual connection was matched by her unflinching dedication to social justice and the plight of people across the African diaspora who have endured the dehumanization of enslavement, colonization, and systemic anti-Black racism.

Lynette played an active role in the Guyanese Association and Afro Canadian Caribbean Association in Hamilton and raised her children with a strong sense pride in their ancestry and culture. In Calgary, Lynette held leadership roles in community-based advocacy groups that challenged systemic injustice and developed educational programming to address the gaps Black youth face in the formal school system. She believed strongly that knowledge of self was a vital gateway to collective liberation and shared passionately from her own education on these subjects.

Her artistic gifts included a penchant for creative writing and Lynette wrote plays and essays that combined her lived experiences, faith, and Afro Guyanese culture of which she was enduringly proud. Her years of research, faith-based education, and desire to see the conditions improve for people in the African diaspora led her to write the book “The Biblical Journey of Slavery: From Egypt to the Americas” and she took great pride presenting her work to a broad audience at community events in different locales across North America.

It was during this period of deeper self-discovery that Lynette added Bani to her last name in recognition of the oral history passed down by her father about the African surname of her paternal grandfather Kwabena John. It was her way to reclaim her Akan/West African heritage imbedded in that name and to restore one of an infinite number of intergenerational gifts that were stolen from her and her ancestors due to the European slave trade of African people.

In her later years, Lynette enjoyed time with loved ones the most and delighted in hosting and traveling to visit friends, siblings, cousins, children, and grandchildren. Her passion and humour in storytelling, political debates, and even a little gossip are well renowned, and it was often said that “Bounkie tongue ain’t lazy.” She embodied unyielding generosity and extended herself, even at great personal cost, to support others.

From sponsoring family members to Canada, supporting farm workers in Ontario to get their Permanent Residency, and giving up her own bed to relatives in need of loving shelter, to freely giving of her financial, emotional, and material resources to those in need, Lynette’s capacity for empathy and love are a testimony to the largeness of her heart and to the legacy of her parents and culture. Not one to shy from controversy, Lynette was confrontational and challenged those around her, sometimes from a place of love and sometimes from a place of her own unhealed pain and trauma. Her fear of losing love, and the pain of lost love, were a presence in her life that took its toll on her psychological, emotional, physical, and spiritual wellness.

In the final years of her life, she embarked on a new healing journey that allowed her to accept responsibility for mistakes of the past, speak truth about the circumstances in which she lived, and free herself from the hurt and disappointment that are all too common among Black women of her generation. Her healing journey gave her a rejuvenated liveliness, put a pep in her step, and opened new pathways for peace, love and joy, allowing her final days to be ones that still included learning, laughter, and singing despite the tragic impacts that Alzheimer’s disease brought to her body.

Lynette is survived by her children Ezra, Stephen and Stephanie, son-in-law Tom, grandchildren Andre and Khadija, and great grandchild Elijah; her siblings Bertram, Claudette, Vilma, Joy, Aileen, Deslyn, Michael, David and Paul; and over a hundred nephews, nieces into the greats and great-greats. She joins her parents Stephanie and Adolphus; her siblings Enid, Joslyn, Deryck, Joan, Pansy, Mark, Keith; and several of her nieces and nephews in the ancestral realm where we pray they are reunited in love, peace, power, and celebration.

We offer a special thanks to the team of caregivers at Blenheim Lodge and the administrators at Vancouver Coastal Health who worked together with her family to make sure that Lynette was safe and well-cared for, making her final home as comfortable and nurturing as they could.

Lynette’s legacy will mean different things to different people, but it is without question one of beauty, power, triumph, and tragedy. The complexity of her life and the choices she made reminds us of bell hooks words: “when we choose to love, we choose to move against fear, against alienation, and separation. The choice to love is the choice to connect, to find ourselves in the other.”