Anita Mahfood
Jamaican dancer and singer
Anita "Margarita" Mahfood (died 2 January 1965) was a dancer, actress, and singer in Jamaica. She was called "the famous Rhumba queen" and headlined performances. Her career developed during the ska era, prior to the emergence of reggae, performing and composing Jamaican popular music of that period, which made her one of the early women in Jamaica to write and sing her own material. Mahfood was murdered in 1965, by her boyfriend Don Drummond of the Skatalites band.
Early life
Anita Mahfood was born in Kingston, Jamaica. She had three sisters. Her father was Jad Mahfood, a fisherman. Her family were Syrian-Lebanese-Jamaican, with ancestors who emigrated from Syria and Lebanon to Jamaica in the 1870s to pursue commercial trade.
Music, life and death
Mahfood lived in east Kingston, on Ocean View Avenue. She was married to Ruldolph Bent, a boxer from Belize, with whom she had two children: Christopher and Suzanne.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Anita Mahfood” is jamaican dancer and singer. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Anita, Mahfood and Jamaican, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “jamaican dancer and singer” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q83015278. VIAF identifies the subject as 38612460. The Library of Congress control number is n94109494. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1965.
A concise life account rarely captures disputed attribution, private networks or the changing language used to describe a career. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.
- Establishing names and roles
- Building a first chronology
- Locating cited institutions
Personal papers, civil or court records, institutional files and the scholarship cited by the source.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Anita Mahfood”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Anita Mahfood primary sources, Anita Mahfood archive and Anita research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Anita Mahfood”?
- Which claims depend on a single source or contested interpretation?
- Which primary records establish identity, chronology and institutional ties?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “Anita Mahfood” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.