06th Feburary 2010
Dancing to Caribbean Drums: An Appreciation of the life of Rex Nettleford

This commentary is being written in the first blush of the news that Rex Nettleford has died. A profound and deep sense of loss overcame me, and I have no doubt enveloped many throughout the Caribbean including those who did not know him personally. What everyone understands - those who knew him personally and those who didn’t - is that he was a Caribbean champion; a man who fervently believed in the worth of the term, “Caribbean person” and gave it both intellectual meaning and depiction.
The entire Caribbean knows, in the inner place that is our Caribbean soul, that, with Nettleford’s passing, the region has lost an essence – an essential ingredient of our own validation as a Caribbean civilization – that was unique and is irreplaceable.
Rex Nettleford simply made Caribbean people more assured of themselves; more comfortable in their skins of whatever colour; and more confident that, despite the fact that they are a transplanted people, they had established a unique cultural identity equal to any in the world.
Nettleford was a Jamaican, but he was Caribbean too. As he said: “The typical West Indian is part-African, part-European, part-Asian, part-Native American but totally Caribbean”. He developed the point by saying: “The texture of character and the sophistication of sense and sensibility engaging the Planet’s systemic contradictions were ironically colonialism’s benefits for a couple of generations in the West Indies. In dealing with the dilemma of difference manifested in the ability to assert without rancor, to draw on a sense of rightness without hubris, to remain human (e) in the face of persistent obscenities that plague the human condition, all such attributes in turn served to endow the Caribbean man with the conviction that Planet Earth is, in the end, one world to share”.
He drew on that reality and his fervent belief in it to serve not only multi-ethnic Jamaica, but the wider multi-ethnic, multi-religious Caribbean, and to be a respected regional representative on the world’s stage including on the Executive Board of the United Nations Education, Social and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
All who knew him in his several incarnations at the University of the West Indies, as Professor, as Vice Chancellor and as emeritus Vice Chancellor, will testify to his great erudition; his capacity to argue passionately and convincingly ; and to the breadth of his knowledge.
I recall well one such international outing when at a biennial meeting of foreign ministers from the UK and the Caribbean, he represented the University of the West Indies in a discussion of the role of education in Caribbean development. I led a delegation from Antigua and Barbuda that included the late Leonard Tim Hector himself an educator and historian. The discussion on the role of education in development was dominated by Nettleford and Hector, and somewhere in the British archives of that meeting held in London is the verbatim record of their enthralling presentations. It was a discussion conducted without a note by the two main speakers, and none who heard it could fail to be impressed by the quality and force of the arguments. But, they did a major service to Caribbean scholars. The Chevening Scholarship resulted from it, and annually Caribbean students journey to the UK for post-graduate work.
From his overarching position as Vice Chancellor of UWI, Nettleford knew, in his own words, that “the world is changing as if in a contest with the speed of light” and UWI had to produce skills “so that its graduates can find firm place and sustained purpose in the ‘knowledge society’ of the third millennium, even while maintaining standards and delivering education of excellence”. “The challenges of politics, economics, social development in the new global situation”, he said, “demanded no less”.