Antigua and Barbuda pays honor with "Mount Obama"

MIAMI (Reuters) - The Caribbean nation of Antigua and Barbuda paid lofty tribute to U.S. President-elect Barack Obama by renaming the volcanic mountain known as "Boggy Peak."

"I shall take immediate measures for Antigua and Barbuda's highest mountain peak to be dedicated in your honor and renamed 'Mount Obama,'" Prime Minister W. Baldwin Spencer wrote in a congratulatory note to the victorious U.S. presidential candidate on Wednesday.

The 1,327-foot (402-metre) volcanic peak rises over southwestern Antigua in the former British colony whose 85,000 residents are mostly descended from African slaves brought in to harvest the sugar cane fields in the 1700s.

"Your message of change will ignite hope and action in people of many countries who might still be passive in the face of inadequacies and injustice," Spencer wrote to Obama, who will be the first black U.S. president. "Your election will not only transform America, it can transform the world."