I value the friendship I had with Barry Chevannes (1940-2010) for he was a special person who loved people and listened to people from all walks of life. He was a trained Jesuit who taught Latin, but left the Jesuits to do outreach work among the poor on Chambers Lane, which is near the Catholic church of Sts Peter and Paul. He also left the Jesuits to get married. At the centre of his life was his wife Pauletta and their talented daughters Abena and Amba.

I met Barry in the 1970s and both of us were activists in the Workers Liberation League and the Workers Party of Jamaica from 1975 to 1988. He was responsible for work among youth and communities. He had extraordinary ability for community activism in both urban and rural settings, and in difficult and violent times was a peacemaker. He started the Partners for Peace in 1997 and then became a member of the board of the Peace Management Initiative on which he worked with Horace Levy, his teacher at St George’s College. He was also active in Fathers Inc and was known by many on the streets wherever in Kingston he went. Comfortable on the corner, in gullies, bars, churches, among the Rastafari, he was a mentor of youth in communities and gave of his time and finances.

He attended the Jesuit seminary in New England for two years starting in 1959 and five years at Boston College, where he gained a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and a master’s degree in the Classics. He later went on to do another master’s in sociology at The University of the West Indies (UWI) and his doctorate in anthropology at Colombia University.

Among his best-known books are Rastafari: Roots and Ideology (1994) and the edited collection Rastafari and Other African-Caribbean Worldviews (1995), Betwixt and Between – Explorations in an African-Caribbean Mindscape (2000), and Learning to Be a Man: Culture, Socialization and Gender Identity in Five Caribbean Communities (2001).

Professor Chevannes served as dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences at The UWI from 1996 to 2004, and his leadership was marked by an open-door policy toward students, a mentorship programme which he led, as well as the introduction in 1998 of a fellowship in folk philosophy which brought grass-roots thought-leaders like Mortimo Planno, Mutabaruka, and Jerry Small to interact with students. He also hosted a display of paintings by social scientists. He infused staff and students with a sense of their own capacity to critically engage with their lecturers and to question them.

Barry Chevannes was also an accomplished songwriter and guitarist, and his music is marked by a revolutionary humanism. His music provided the soundtrack for the radical 1970s with singles such as Forward March against Imperialism and Children of the Revolution. His religious songs are in hymnals. In 2001, along with Colin Leslie, he produced Black Op – a 15-song CD .

Professor Chevannes gave extensive public service. He headed the National Commission on Ganja and the Caricom Youth Commission, chaired Jamaica’s first Reparation Commission, and was chair of the Institute of Jamaica from 1997 to 2010. He brought the Institute of Jamaica’s Musgrave Award Ceremony into the streets so that those who lived in the lanes off East Street and elsewhere could participate in this annual ritual of recognising outstanding performers in the arts and the sciences.

He had a deep understanding of Jamaican culture as a dynamic process that was continuously being created and, while valuing the institutions that had been created to sustain that culture, felt they lagged behind the culture itself.

He was posthumously invested into the Order of Jamaica when Bruce Golding was prime minister and his contribution to Jamaica and the region deserves to be remembered.

For an even greater appreciation of Professor Chevannes see the essays by Horace Levy, Jake Homiak, Clinton Hutton in Jamaica Journal, Volume 36, Nos 1-2, December 2015.

Professor Rupert Lewis is a research fellow at the P J Patterson Centre for Africa-Caribbean Advocacy at The University of the West Indies. He is also a member of the National Council on Reparation. Send comments to the Jamaica Observer or rupertlew@gmail.com.