William Alexander Bustamante (1884-1977) was a Jamaican labor leader who became Jamaica's first chief minister under limited self-government and the first prime minister after independence in 1962.

William Alexander Bustamante, perhaps Jamaica's most flamboyant and charismatic politician, was born William Alexander Clarke on February 24, 1884. His father, Robert Constantine Clarke, a member of the declining white plantocracy, was the overseer of a small, mixed-crop plantation called Blenheim, in the parish of Hanover on the then-isolated northwestern coast of the island. By virtue of the second marriage of Elsie Hunter, his paternal grandmother, to Alexander Shearer, he became distantly related to both Norman Washington Manley and Michael Manley, as well as to Hugh Shearer--all of whom were to be chief ministers or prime ministers of Jamaica. His mother, Mary Wilson, descended from the sturdy, independent Black peasantry of rural Hanover.

Bustamante is the surname which he formally adopted in September 1944, although...