The legendary Ian Boyne would have been 67 years old this year (March 13). I wrote this piece a week after his funeral to share my reflections on this remarkable man.

A famous wag (whose name now escapes me) once remarked that any journalist who had more than two people in attendance at his funeral was a disgrace to his profession. I cannot help thinking that by this morose reckoning the tremendous outpouring of love showered on the remarkable life of Boyne would have brought journalism into absolute disrepute.

I always got the impression that though Boyne was a public figure, he was a very private man. He seemed able to attract enormous publicity without conceding much by way of his own personal privacy. Though he was easy-going in his demeanour, there was always a discernible sense of decorum in his manner, and I cannot recall ever seeing him without a jacket and tie. One could have been forgiven the thought that he slept in a business suit.

Prior to his funeral, I was not privy to Boyne’s provenance. I was not aware that he had any siblings. He did. I reasonably suspected that he had parents, though I cannot recall him ever mentioning them. He would speak fondly of his daughter, Kelly-Ann, and of his Saturday night dates with his wife, Margaret. He would reveal not much else about himself, at least not to me. Boyne seemed most at ease discussing ideas.

I always wondered why I had never heard him mention his days in high school during our many discussions and even questioned whether he had grown up overseas. How could such an imposing figure in our national life have passed through our school system without leaving some memorable trace?

I would later learn that he did not attend any of the traditional high schools. According to his sister, Boyne attended Pembroke Hall Secondary (High) School where he took the decision to drop out so he could take care of his siblings. It would seem that Boyne kept perhaps one of the most inspirational stories — that of his own incredible life — largely from public view.

Yet Boyne was not modest. He didn’t need to be. In fact, he could have been described as charmingly vain. He knew he was good and would not pretend otherwise. His vanity was to many simply an amusing feature of a man deservedly satisfied with himself.

Boyne, though a preacher, was acutely aware that while the religious among us should not resile from political participation, they should be mindful that their ideas might not always prevail in a democratic contest. While he wanted our polity to be informed by Christian values, he seemed uncomfortable with the notion of theocratic governance.

Boyne was never sanctimonious and was able to widen his audience appeal through his active engagement with the popular culture. He constantly provoked discussions about the influence of music on public morals and for him the high point of Jamaican music was the rocksteady era, with his hero Alton Ellis as a secular saint.

He and culture and development specialist Dr Carolyn Cooper effectively used their disagreements on Jamaican culture as a means of catapulting themselves to new heights of popularity. Both were good for each other and the nation.

There were some who were a little concerned that the message of his signature programme,
Profile — which often showed individuals achieving against considerable odds — could have provided ammunition for those who might deem these examples of triumph over adversity as an excuse for not providing an enabling environment for the disadvantaged among us. While the stories on
Profile were truly inspirational, many of those interviewed by Boyne were outliers whose achievements could not have been easily replicated by the vast majority of our populace.

Boyne was a passionate advocate for social intervention to protect the most vulnerable among us. He was highly critical of doctrinaire free market orthodoxy, which often construes the provision of protection for the dispossessed as a drag on economic prosperity.

As if to complicate our assessment of him, Boyne supported the notion that it is the moral fabric of a country and not economistic metrics which would ultimately determine the real success of a nation.

Some might conclude that by holding what could be deemed ostensibly divergent views, Boyne was a rhetorical contortionist; however, he understood that while individual agency played a role in what we consider to be success, it was also important for our society to provide opportunities to facilitate the advancement of the dispossessed. He further contended that material possession could not guarantee happiness and that the cultivation of the right attitude was perhaps the best tonic for the human spirit.

Boyne was a believer in the value of ideologies. He was of the view that moral relativism, a feature of our post-modern social construct, is nihilistic in its outlook and fingered it as a cause of the social malaise gripping our society.

He was of the view that the decline of ideology deprived us of the moral certitudes which he deemed necessary for the ordering of society. However, he believed that ideological systems should be interrogated. Ideas mattered to him.

The last time I saw Boyne was in the fall of 2016 (we would speak a number of times subsequently on the phone) when we met for the taping of an episode of
Food For Thought hosted by Leahcim Semaj and me. Leahcim and I had a lively and informative discussion with Boyne on the role of religion in politics.

We agreed, among other things, that people of strong religious conviction have significantly influenced the political process, citing Martin Luther King Jr and Sam Sharpe among the exemplars. We also concluded that State-sanctioned religions often lacked popular support.

Boyne was a nuanced thinker, an endangered specie in the current political culture, characterised by extremism and intransigence. While there were those who construed his equanimity as a sign of indecision, the tributes accorded him show that though it is the brusque and the uncivil who will often grab our attention, it is the polite and the thoughtful who will earn our enduring affection.

clyde.mckenzie@gmail.com