THE University of the West Indies (The UWI) has hailed Professor Locksley Edmondson for championing “Caribbean scholarship with unwavering passion”, and described him as “a luminous scholar whose wisdom and warmth have inspired generations of students, colleagues, and communities across the globe”.

Edmondson, regarded as an influential Jamaican scholar of international relations whose career spanned more than five decades across several countries, died on August 18 in Ithaca, New York. He was 92.

The UWI, in its tribute, said Edmondson was a founding member and leader in the Caribbean Studies Association who, as president of the African Studies Association of the West Indies, amplified the region’s voices and perspectives on the global stage.

“His legacy continues to spark inspiration in Caribbean scholars and advocates everywhere,” The UWI said, adding that his achievements garnered international acclaim, including numerous honours such as the Distinguished Africanist Award from the New York African Studies Association.

“Yet, it is his mentorship, humility, and unwavering belief in the potential of Caribbean and African peoples that The University of the West Indies community will cherish most deeply,” the university said.

“Professor Locksley Edmondson has left a legacy of path-breaking scholarship on Pan African connections — the exact title of a 2017 symposium at Cornell University held in his honour which attracted a vast array of his former students alongside African, Caribbean, and transatlantic scholars,” said his colleague, Professor Edward Greene, a former United Nations secretary general special envoy for HIV in the Caribbean.

“Besides highlighting his profound advocacy for intellectual curiosity and the creative leadership that defines the Caribbean intellectual tradition, the event beautifully portrayed how these attributes converged with his international endeavours in Haiti, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, and South Africa,” Greene added.

Professor Densil Williams, pro-vice-chancellor and principal of the Mona campus, said: “The UWI and our region have lost an intellectual giant. His legacy of scholarship will remain as his major contribution to advancing our development as a people. Our Mona campus is proud to have been associated with this brilliant mind.”

At the same time, The UWI’s Vice Chancellor Professor Sir Hilary Beckles described Edmondson as “a powerful pedagogical force in the intellectual decolonisation of the region and The UWI”.

Beckles added that Edmondson was a leader in the curriculum transformation of the Faculty of Social Sciences at Mona and beyond, adding that, “as an outstanding scholar in the Pan-African pantheon he was one of UWI’s greatest orators in both classrooms and communities. He was an inspiring intellectual who guided the younger generation, including me as a Mona member. We celebrate his life and legacy as we send blessings to his wife, Elizabeth and all his family”.

Edmondson, who was born in Clarendon, attended Jamaica College in St Andrew. In the late 1950s he went to England to complete his undergraduate degree at University of Birmingham, specialising in political science, economics, and sociology, and graduating with honours.

It was at Birmingham where he met other Commonwealth students from Africa and Asia, and was introduced to anti-colonial political discourses such as Marxism and Pan Africanism that were shaping the independence movements of Jamaica and the rest of the colonial world. Those discourses informed his later scholarship as a professor.

He later moved to Canada to pursue his doctorate in political science at Queen’s University, conducting research at Schomburg Library in New York City as he completed his thesis on the US civil rights movement.

Eventually, he accepted an offer from University of Waterloo to become the first black professor of the fledgling Department of Political Science there.

In 1967 he was awarded a Rockefeller Fellowship to become a visiting professorship at Makerere University in Uganda where he became close friends with the luminaries of the Pan Africanist independence movements of Africa and the Caribbean, including CLR James, Ali Mazrui, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o.

In 1970 Edmondson joined the Department of Government at Cornell University and quickly developed a friendship with James Turner, the founder and director of the newly formed Africana Studies & Research Center — the first centre of its kind in the United States to centre the African Diaspora.

Despite his ascent in the American academy, Edmondson longed to be a part of the nation-building movements of the post-independence societies of the Caribbean. So in 1973 he returned to Jamaica to join the Department of Government at The UWI, where he stayed until 1981, lecturing and building innovative programmes during his tenure as dean of social sciences.

He was also a member of a cohort of intellectuals from The UWI who advised Prime Minister Michael Manley during the turbulent yet heady nationalism years of the 1970s.

He is survived by his wife, Elizabeth; children Georgette, Belinda, Magnus, and Alisha. His elder son Christopher predeceased him in 2016.