RALSTON ‘Rex’ Nettleford deserves every superlative used to describe this extraordinary man who, for more than 50 years, gave his enormous intellect, sound public policy advice and creative energy to the Jamaican people and, more broadly, to humanity.

But as we praise him for his boundless generosity and accomplishments that can only be listed in a book, we need to remember that his life’s work was fundamentally about contributing to the building of the Jamaican project, that is, a nation transformed from the distortions of its past to a place where opportunity is not bequeathed as legacy, but available to all on the basis of equity without regard to race, class or gender.

As a reminder of some of Professor Nettleford’s thoughts on the Jamaican project, I reread some of the essays in one of his seminal works, Mirror Mirror: Identity, Race and Protest in Jamaica, published in 1970, just eight years after Independence.

The book was published against a background of the turbulent 1960s. It was a period of rapid decolonisation in Africa, of the Civil Rights movement in the United States and the assassination of Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr, and of global protests against America’s unpopular war against Vietnam.

In Jamaica, 1968 was the year that one of the Caribbean’s leading scholar-activists, Dr Walter Rodney, was expelled by the Hugh Shearer government for espousing Black Power and other radical ideas. As Rex said in the book, the 1960s saw “various expressions of anti-intellectualism” when the Government banned books and people alike.

In the context of the period of official resistance to assertions of blackness, Mirror Mirror was not only timely but it took some courage to publish a book of essays concerned mainly with “the problems of the Jamaican black majority and the uncertainties and contradictions of their role in what is supposed to be their country”.

Nettleford recalled the controversy in 1967 over the omission of Jean Rerrie from the final six in the Miss Jamaica Beauty contest because, according to her sponsor, she had “suffered a decided disadvantage on account of her colour (dark-skinned) and natural hairstyle”. She had massive popular support.

Influential Gleaner columnist at the time, Morris Cargill, writing under the pseudonym Thomas Wright, deplored the amount of publicity given to a “trivial” event while Political Reporter (Ulric Simmonds) saw the matter as a “reflection of persistent attitudes” in the society and charged the judges with “racial bias”.

It is worth noting that Cargill was white, a representative of the plantation elite and a leading part of the established order. Simmonds was black – from the peasantry or lower middle class. Both would consider themselves Jamaican to the core, part of the contradiction.

Some Jamaicans in the established order refused to admit the existence of racial bias and privilege in Jamaican society, instead calling attention to their “strong commitment to the multi-racial ethic” embodied in the motto, “Out of Many, One People”.

But as Nettleford commented at the time, this was a bit of a cop-out: “It is essential that the established order admits that considerations of race awareness, race pride and the cry for black recognition and status are important and even fundamental to the aspirations and life of a sizable proportion of the Jamaican populace.”

Nettleford believed that the black nationalism of the Rastafarian movement as well as Black Power advocacy “instituted trends that are irreversible”. For example, “Values born exclusively of European experience and long embraced with indiscriminating fervour can no longer maintain their accustomed position of eminence.”

However, current practices like ‘skin bleaching’ and attractiveness of ‘browning’ (reflected in Buju Banton’s hit single Love Me Browning) suggest that issues of identity and race remain in the psyche: “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?”

At the same time, many traditional values have largely been eroded. As Nettleford remarked at his installation as vice chancellor in 1999, Jamaica was suffering from “too much bhutuism parading as roots”.

In the political arena, Nettleford predicted that black radicalism in the ’60s “will force them [political leaders] to take decisions designed to effect black mass betterment in the seventies. Anything short of this will only serve to perpetuate the disastrous myth that to be black is to be ill-starred in Jamaica”.

He added: “Nothing that will in effect perpetuate the self-hate and the lack of confidence among the Jamaican blacks (the masses and the new middle class alike) must be allowed to take a hold of public policy – whether it be in education, in the training of young skills or the retraining of old skills, in the creation of job opportunities at all levels of industry (particularly those in top management), or in the overall maximisation of economic resources.”

Michael Manley and the People’s National Party (PNP) government in the 1970s responded to some of the challenges thrown down by Nettleford and introduced a raft of social legislation that succeeded in some degree to rebalancing the social agenda.

But while many blacks became owners and senior managers of economic enterprises, the overall result was that Manley failed to achieve the “mass betterment” that Rex sought.

Indeed, four decades after Mirror Mirror the Jamaican economy has hardly grown, people are hurting at every level, and the economy was placed on IMF life support Thursday when the Fund approved a loan of nearly US$1.3 billion.

Nettleford also argued that ways must be found to “decrease the hegemony of the entrenched business oligarchy” which is “overwhelmingly non-black”.

I believe there was some progress in that direction in the two decades from the 1970s to the 1990s but, regrettably, much of those gains was eroded by the financial system meltdown of the 1990s that saw the collapse of several indigenous financial institutions and the businesses they supported.

In that context it is a pity that the current Finsac Commission of Enquiry is so mired in partisan and procedural controversy that it may be unable to provide clear, compelling and credible answers to the questions: What went wrong and what can we learn from it?

One of the more insightful predictions in the book was that Jamaican governments will, after the 1970s, “be heavily burdened with how power, political and economic, is administered… shared and distributed.”

The establishment of an independent Electoral Commission has done much to meet Professor Nettleford’s concern that “the acquisition of power by the one or the other [PNP or JLP] be the result of means fair rather than foul”.

However, the political arrangement has been less successful in forging consensus on national priorities or in providing “everyone in the society with opportunities for equal access” to education, political power, and investment capital. The failure has been mainly evident in education, which has suffered from years of over-promise and under-investment.

In the absence of political will, black people must themselves insist on education. First, they should not resist the drive to excel in education on “the spurious grounds” that it was a ‘white value’, or that it really means “excellence on the master’s criteria”. Nor should they worry about quality education creating an elite.

The reality is that in any society it is an elite who will create and innovate. The key, said Professor Nettleford, is that access to the elite must be open. “To stake out arbitrarily the sources from which that elite must be drawn is to deprive the country of the unpredictable resourcefulness of the human being, whatever his station in life or his social origins.”

He was an exemplary elite and the country would have been much poorer if it had been denied his intellect, resourcefulness and the example of his life.

kcr@cwjamaica.com