The death of Professor Rex Nettleford, Vice-Chancellor Emeritus of the University of the West Indies and one of the great intellects of the Americas – and beyond – has left a huge void in the cultural life of his native Jamaica, and resonated far beyond its shores.

He was passionately West Indian, believing that because of the mix of cultures, and in many cases of genes, the people of the Caribbean are unique and distinct.

“We are part African, part European, part Asian and part Native Amerindian – but totally Caribbean,” he told a Toronto audience two years ago. “I have been charged with a ‘Creoliste’ bias in claiming for the region its own inner logic and consistency, rooted in cross-cultural encounters, which add up to more than cross-breeding, in other words to the creation of something uniquely different – and distinctively Caribbean.”

Nettleford was an original thinker, a man who refused to be put in a box or pigeon-holed by convention or society.

His passing will be especially felt at the UWI, where he spent his entire professional life, devoting himself to its development, and rising to be Vice-Chancellor in 1996. Indeed, he was on a UWI fund-raising mission when struck down by a devastating heart attack in a Washington, DC hotel. Rushed into intensive care, he never regained consciousness and died on February 2, four hours short of his 77th birthday.

Born in the Jamaican north coast town of Falmouth on February 3, 1933, Ralston Milton “Rex” Nettleford attended Cornwall College in Montego Bay, and pursued a history degree at the then University College of the West Indies (London University). Awarded a Rhodes Scholarship in 1957, he undertook postgraduate studies in politics at Oxford University, then returned home to pursue a lifelong academic and artistic career as a public intellectual.

Initially director of the UWI’s School for Continuing Studies, he went on to become professor of Extramural Studies, heading the Adult Education Programme, then became founder of the university’s Trade Union Education Institute. He first came to serious public notice in 1960 as co-author of path-breaking study called The Rastafarian Movement in Kingston, Jamaica, and subsequently published a whole slew of collected essays and major cultural studies.

Nettleford endorsed the phrase “Black Atlantic”, calling it “the civilisation to which the Americas on the Atlantic seaboard belongs”. The question of a “Caribbean aesthetic” so intrigued him that he enthusiastically engaged in the ongoing “discourse… of defining and re-defining self and society”.

In 1962 he was one member of a triumvirate who created Roots and Rhythms, a cultural dance extravaganza, for Jamaica’s Independence celebrations. The following year he co-founded the National Dance Theatre Company, which he always maintained was a consciously political statement, as well as a cultural and artistic one.

“It was founded with a formed purpose – to secure for the Jamaican people one way of articulating cultural identity, and to build faith in a historical reality,” he told me once. “This immediately locates the Caribbean in the wider spheres of endeavour, suggesting myriad – multiple – paths to our sense of being, our place and purpose in the world, and our sense of knowing.”

A Nettleford lecture or presentation was always carefully researched, multi-layered and impeccably delivered, his elocution and diction pristine. He expected much of his listeners, and literary allusions, odd pieces of Latin, and references to thinkers and writers who had stimulated his own perceptions, tripped from his tongue.

This was not snobbery or pretentiousness. It was Rex N, imparting the thoughts and conclusions – though he considered all ideas and premises, indeed, life itself, to be works in progress – which he was presenting for consideration.

He was also titillating and provocative, once challenging a lily-white audience in snowbound Saskatchewan, by telling them that they needed to become “as Negrified as I am Europeanised, and come to terms with it”.

He received 19 honorary degrees, and many awards, including the Order of Merit from the Government of Jamaica in 1975, being made an Officer in the Ordre des Arts et Lettres by the Government of France and receiving the Pablo Neruda Centenary Medal from the Government of Chile in 2004. He was especially proud in 2004 when the Rhodes Trust of Oxford established “The Rex Nettleford Prize in Cultural Studies” to mark the centenary of the Rhodes scholarships in the Caribbean.

Internationally, Nettleford was a founding governor of the Ottawa-based International Development Research Centre, International Trustee of the US-based AFS Intercultural, and a much respected chairman of the Commonwealth Arts Organisation. Add to that a stint on the Executive Board of UNESCO, membership of the Group of Experts monitoring the Implementation of Sanctions and other Actions against Apartheid and a member of the West Indian Commission. He was also a member of Ghana’s Castles and Fort Trust Fund and was rapporteur of the International Scientific Committee of UNESCO’s Slave Route Project, as well as regional coordinator for the Caribbean.

Nettleford’s last visit to Toronto was for the 25th anniversary celebrations of the Black Action Defence Committee. Prior to that he was here for the Convention of the International Association of Blacks in Dance, where he unburdened himself of a brilliant cultural exposition, on which I congratulated him.

“Ah, my dear boy,” he responded. “I am in the Sunset of Empire!”

Well, now the sun has set, old friend. You will be sorely missed.

Colin Rickards is a British-born Canadian-based journalist and author. He has been writing from, to and about the Caribbean for five decades.

colin.rickards@sympatico.ca