Rex Nettleford's astounding confession

I have long believed that no man is without an enemy in this world, even if it is only about professional jealousy.

But I am convinced that if we walk the length and breadth of Jamaica, we would be hard put to find anyone who has an ill word to say about the late Professor Rex Nettleford.

In death, Rex looms as large as ever. Here is a man about whom those who pay tribute can utter more than platitudes out of a mere sense of duty. As a teacher of the emerging nation, he spread himself across so many fields of endeavours that one could not help but wonder what manner of man is this?

I have my own recollections about Rex who once wrote a memorable letter to this column. But more importantly, he spent many years as the head of the National Journalism Awards Committee which supervised the work of the judges selected by the Press Association of Jamaica. In fact, Rex was the National Committee! While he did the job, there was hardly any detracting voices about who got awards, difficult as that is to achieve.

When this newspaper was born in 1993, I prevailed upon the CEO to invite Rex to our first Editorial Committee to help give the paper a solid start. Busy as he was, he consented to sit on the committee.

In neither case was he being paid. But he loved journalism and it is to his everlasting credit that he was often thought of as a journalist. His eye-opening commentaries on the now-defunct Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation (JBC) Television are not likely to be forgotten by those who had the privilege of hearing them.

But the thing I'll remember most about Rex Nettleford was an astounding confession -- at least it was to me -- that he made to a small group of us surrounding him after a brilliant lecture in Chicago in 1986.

We had asked Rex why he did not enter representative politics in Jamaica, given his popularity and the national respect he enjoyed among Jamaicans. His reply? "Black people would not elect me as prime minister." The late Hugh Lawson Shearer was prime minister but he was not chosen by general election. I understood Rex to be saying that one as black as he was would not be favoured by the masses.

Perhaps Rex was wrong or he was saying what many in the United States said before Barack Obama was elected president, that no Blackman would ever be elected to that office. As fate would have it,

PJ Patterson was elected and led his party for four consecutive terms as prime minister.

As a child, I also recalled my mother talking all the time about Rex Nettleford and his mother who predeceased him last year. She believed he was the most educated man she had ever seen. So we grew up in a household in which Rex was like part of the family though in absentia. That's how Jamaica felt about him. In time, we'll come to the full realisation, as a nation, of the loss we have been dealt with the passing of a true giant of our times. Rest in Peace Ralston 'Rex' Nettleford.

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