First-ever Eric R. Wickham Scholarship awarded to Centennial College student

By Lincoln DePradine

The legacy of the late Eric R. Wickham, a respected elder and educator of the Black and Caribbean community, has been further cemented.

Eric R. Wickham

A presentation, of the first-ever Eric R. Wickham Memorial Scholarship, has been made to a Centennial College student. The winner of the inaugural scholarship is Marwa Malik.

Malik, who was formally presented with the scholarship at Centennial’s 2024 “Student Awards Night’’, was congratulated by Wickham’s daughter Aisha.

“It was an honour to meet Marwa at the ‘Student Awards’ ceremony, which just happened to take place on Dad’s birthday,’’ said Aisha Wickham. Her father would have been 84.

“You lived a long and full and impactful life, but you are still gone too soon. I love you and miss you,’’ Aisha Wickham said in a birthday tribute to her father.

Marwa Malik (in Hijab) with Emily Wickham and Aisha, grandson (left) & Alembe

Barbados-born Eric Wickham was a professional accountant, who also exhibited a fervent commitment for community development and preserving and teaching African history.

At Centennial, where he was a business instructor from 1979 to 2004, Wickham also developed a groundbreaking general education college course titled, “Ancient Africa: Glorious Legacies’’, which provided an in-depth self-study of African kingdoms and Egyptian antiquity.

His family – which includes his wife Emily; Aisha; his son, Olembe; and four grandchildren – announced plans for the establishment of the scholarship shortly after Wickham’s death last November at Scarborough Centenary Hospital.

The family participated in the drafting of the criteria for the scholarship, which is worth $2,500.00.

Sudan-born Malik is a student in the business school at Centennial. She’s studying office administration, with a focus on health services.

“Connection to the Black community is a core tenet of the scholarship’’, said Aisha Wickham, whose father’s “passion was for uplifting the Black community in so many things that he did’’.

Eric Wickham, Aisha said, “would have been proud to know that the Wickham name was attached to such an honour at an institution that he was proud to be associated with’’.

The scholarship, she added, is a “fitting way for us to keep dad’s name alive’’.

Local Journalism Initiative Reporter