Prof. Rex Nettleford heart attack in Washington, DC

**evanovitch** · 02-04-2010, 09:02 PM

Re: Professor Rex Nettleford has passed away...

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: MGee</div><div class="ubbcode-body"><div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: RichD</div><div class="ubbcode-body"><div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: MGee</div><div class="ubbcode-body">

u know, rich, having wife and pickney is not incongruous with certain orientations. </div></div> but he never claimed "impeccable credentials" as far as i know </div></div>

what do u mean? </div></div>

u can read it fi mean dat rear admiral bizniz is not someting u mention openly pon u resume

**evanovitch** · 02-04-2010, 09:07 PM

Re: Professor Rex Nettleford has passed away...

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Tuff Gong</div><div class="ubbcode-body"><div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: RichD</div><div class="ubbcode-body"> but he never claimed "impeccable credentials" as far as i know </div></div>

He sure as hell didn't.
I also heard first folks of lying folks claiming <span style="font-weight: bold">he was humble</span>.....gimme a freaking break! </div></div>

hell yes...compared to who come bout an di fuss ting dem do is cite dem degree, dem earnings an how much bizniz dem own r a set up...humble has many meanings and if u know Rex u know how it is applicable to him...his regal bearing is part of his Jamaicaness n his dancing...

after reading wat u have written re Rex i can see u knew Rex from afar even if u participated in things he was a part of...

anybody who know Jamaica know dat demeanours change depending on 'in situi' if i can stretch an use dat term

**RichD** · 02-04-2010, 11:47 PM

Re: Professor Rex Nettleford has passed away...

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: MGee</div><div class="ubbcode-body"><div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: RichD</div><div class="ubbcode-body"><div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: MGee</div><div class="ubbcode-body">

u know, rich, having wife and pickney is not incongruous with certain orientations. </div></div> but he never claimed "impeccable credentials" as far as i know </div></div>

what do u mean? </div></div> yuh nuh remember when the previous to the previous PM did get up in parliament and claim impeccable credentials in that area? jus a play offa dat.

**evanovitch** · 02-07-2010, 02:57 AM

Stella's column on Rex...TG u need to read it

COLUMNS

WE KNOW...OUR REX LIVES ON

Friday, February 05, 2010
THE NATION MOURNS the passing of one of its most illustrious sons. Superlatives abound in praise of the Hon Rex Nettleford, OM (Order of Merit), FIOJ (Fellow of the Institute of Jamaica).
He was one of the chosen few, who had the opportunity to hear what people thought of him. Throughout the Caribbean and the diaspora, "respect-due" was given in the form of honours and awards to a remarkable man with a remarkable mind, one in whom all the arts met. Not everyone could deal with that kind of talent. He once recalled the outburst of someone who exclaimed "I hate you. How come you know so much?" The remark was delivered with a tinge of humour, but, Rex recalled, the speaker wasn't laughing.
Today, as we celebrate him, let's not "gild the anthurium" according to a phrase of his, one of many which he coined and left behind to become part of our conventional wisdom.
NETTLEFORD... people marvelled that he could do so many different, demanding things at the same time.
1/1
In his role as godfather to peers struggling with doubt or frustration about some issue or other, he would advise: "It will all come out in the wash." I have to confess, there were times when such a word of solace in the midst of some artistic crisis would infuriate me. I wanted to shout back, "It is all right for you. You are Rex Nettleford, I am just a mere mortal." After the absurdity of my senior moment had passed, the next response (unspoken of course) was, "Awright, I'll show you." Inevitably, the offending obstacle did come out in the wash, cleansed of stupidity and whatever else was delaying a positive result. Once again, Rex was right.
As we reel off the staggering list of his numerous achievements, his sly sense of humour is often overlooked. His famous "A Bootoo in a Benz" offered a glimpse into his less serious side, but even in that, the intellectual quality of the observation could not be ignored. In the land of hurry-come-up, bootoos in their Benzes do not always recognise who they are.
Then there was "Our hearts are laced with larceny". In a society where we spend much of our productive time figuring out how to shaft each other, it was our capacity for corruption which warranted the reproof. Another of his sayings was "Don't gild the anthurium." Other cultures spoke of the lily as the flower which needs no ornamentation. Rex chose the anthurium, a flower from our own field, showy enough not to need trimmings or other evidence of bad taste.
The man who railed against Rex for knowing so much might well have done so because he couldn't understand how he lived the same experiences as Nettleford, yet failed to come away with eminence and fame. When we list Rex's achievements, it all sounds so easy. We admire the rags-to-riches story of the little boy from Bunkers Hill, Trelawny, a small rural community clinging to the edge of the Cockpit Country, who won a scholarship to Cornwall College then to the University College of the West Indies and then to Oxford University via a Rhodes Scholarship. It's the dream we all want for our children -- except for the hard-times part. Just give us the scholarships and the accolades.
Who would care to recall a childhood in the school of hard knocks -- one pair of pants worn to school Monday to Friday then refurbished for Sunday School. One fateful Sunday morning, the overworked garment split its seams ending up a sort of skirt which drew a jeering crowd following our hero all the way down the hill from church to home. Obeying grandmother's instruction to "hold up yuh head", the young boy conquered shame and embarrassment and went on, stronger than ever.
Oxford University too had its moments requiring much "hold up head". Black had not been deemed beautiful up to then, but again, the boy from Trelawny triumphed, head held high. Years later, when Oxford celebrated the Centenary of the Rhodes Scholarship, it was no surprise, certainly for his friends, when he was one of the chosen very few, selected to represent the thousands of Rhodes scholars across the world. After all the pomp and ceremony, which came with it, he was soon back at his desk, six o' clock in the morning on his beloved Mona Campus, getting on with the work, which included using money which came with the Rhodes honour to establish a trust to help young Jamaicans prepare for their turn at winning their own Rhodes.
It is no cliché to report that Rex Nettleford was successful because he worked hard, very hard, in everything he undertook. His success as an educator was not simply about slinging his many degrees around. After the ceremonial robes and caps of investiture were packed away, he went right back to focusing on how to expand the horizons of those he taught -- even while recognising that he himself had much more to learn.
He respected people who were "educable". It was the highest accolade he could pay. What he didn't let on was that he was very educable himself, willing to take on impossible tasks, travelling endless miles to get to the sources, stretching himself to the limit. It was no surprise that he titled one of his books Inward Stretch, Outward Reach.
People marvelled that he could do so many different, demanding things at the same time. To the very end he still worked out at least once a week at the NDTC studio and never stopped pushing the Company to attain excellence. He made time to work with the University Singers and the LTM Pantomime. He lectured to young communicators in training at Carimac. He conducted master classes for students at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts.
As he lectured and wrote and travelled, he made time for close friends upon whom he lavished books and news clippings from publications picked up along the way. He collected Jamaican art, including works by Albert Huie, another son of Trelawny who preceded him in death only a week before. He listened to all kinds of music, "from Mahler to Marley" he used to say. He loved to play Uncle Rex to his friend's children, especially those of NDTC members and their children's children.
He had a tight band of devoted friends who were fiercely loyal to him and he to us. Wednesday, February 3 was a lonely day. Instead of celebrating another birthday with him, we were left to contemplate the significance of our loss.
The NDTC will go on tour next month without him, for the first time in their 47 years of existence. He prepared them for a time such as this. "I'm presiding over my own liquidation," he used to say ... half-serious, half-joking. As his heirs and successors pledge to carry on what he started, we know ... our Rex lives on ...
[email protected]

**evanovitch** · 02-08-2010, 02:24 AM

Rex Nettleford burial on Feb 16

THE FUNERAL for the late Professor Rex Nettleford has been scheduled for next week Tuesday.

He is expected to receive an official funeral, with the Government already indicating it is involved in the planning.

<span style="font-weight: bold"> this is one decision fi an official finaral whe mi no ha no problem wid </span>

**Panajar** · 02-08-2010, 12:49 PM

Rex Nettleford's astounding confession

<span style="font-size: 14pt">Rex Nettleford's astounding confession</span>

I have long believed that no man is without an enemy in this world, even if it is only about professional jealousy.

But I am convinced that if we walk the length and breadth of Jamaica, we would be hard put to find anyone who has an ill word to say about the late Professor Rex Nettleford.

In death, Rex looms as large as ever. Here is a man about whom those who pay tribute can utter more than platitudes out of a mere sense of duty. As a teacher of the emerging nation, he spread himself across so many fields of endeavours that one could not help but wonder what manner of man is this?

I have my own recollections about Rex who once wrote a memorable letter to this column. But more importantly, he spent many years as the head of the National Journalism Awards Committee which supervised the work of the judges selected by the Press Association of Jamaica. In fact, Rex was the National Committee! While he did the job, there was hardly any detracting voices about who got awards, difficult as that is to achieve.

When this newspaper was born in 1993, I prevailed upon the CEO to invite Rex to our first Editorial Committee to help give the paper a solid start. Busy as he was, he consented to sit on the committee.

In neither case was he being paid. But he loved journalism and it is to his everlasting credit that he was often thought of as a journalist. His eye-opening commentaries on the now-defunct Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation (JBC) Television are not likely to be forgotten by those who had the privilege of hearing them.
<span style="font-size: 17pt">But the thing I'll remember most about Rex Nettleford was an astounding confession -- at least it was to me -- that he made to a small group of us surrounding him after a brilliant lecture in Chicago in 1986.

We had asked Rex why he did not enter representative politics in Jamaica, given his popularity and the national respect he enjoyed among Jamaicans. His reply? "Black people would not elect me as prime minister." The late Hugh Lawson Shearer was prime minister but he was not chosen by general election. I understood Rex to be saying that one as black as he was would not be favoured by the masses.</span> (YEP BLACKS WERE CONDITIONED TO THINK "ANYTING TOO BLACK NO GOOD" some still have the same belief )

Perhaps Rex was wrong or he was saying what many in the United States said before Barack Obama was elected president, that no Blackman would ever be elected to that office. As fate would have it,

PJ Patterson was elected and led his party for four consecutive terms as prime minister.

As a child, I also recalled my mother talking all the time about Rex Nettleford and his mother who predeceased him last year. She believed he was the most educated man she had ever seen. So we grew up in a household in which Rex was like part of the family though in absentia. That's how Jamaica felt about him. In time, we'll come to the full realisation, as a nation, of the loss we have been dealt with the passing of a true giant of our times. Rest in Peace Ralston 'Rex' Nettleford.

LINK

**evanovitch** · 02-09-2010, 03:15 AM

Nettleford cremated, official funeral confirmed

Professor Rex Nettleford's body has been cremated in the United States and the ashes are to be transported to Jamaica for an official funeral next Tuesday.

Vice-Chancellor of the University of the West Indies, (UWI), Professor E. Nigel Harris, will accompany the remains home later this week.

Nettleford's funeral will take place at the University Chapel, Mona campus, at 10 a.m.

Olivia Grange, minister of youth, sports and culture, made the disclosure during a press conference at the UWI in St Andrew yesterday.

Condolence books will also be opened in honour of Nettleford at locations to be announced.

According to Grange, the Government has taken the position that, although the funeral is official, the activities will be collaborative, accommodating the wishes of persons who were closely affiliated with the cultural icon.

Parliament suspended

As part of the events to give tribute to Nettleford, business will be suspended in Parliament next Tuesday to accommodate tributes from members. Former Prime Ministers P.J. Patterson and Edward Seaga will be among persons to make their contributions at that time.

The UWI is spearheading the planning of all the activities to celebrate, recognise and pay tribute to the renowned son of Jamaica.

<span style="font-weight: bold">A grand cultural jamboree is also being planned for Thursday, the ninth day since Nettleford's death. This celebration will be held at the Ranny Williams Entertainment Centre.</span>

Nettleford died last Tuesday at The George Washington University Hospital in Washington, DC, days after suffering a heart attack on January 27.

**Wahalla** · 02-09-2010, 10:32 AM

Re: Rex Nettleford's astounding confession

And here I thought it was because so many Jamaicans like to bun fiya about sexuality.. Also acedemians make awful polticians...

**Panajar** · 02-09-2010, 02:01 PM

Rex Nettleford and the Jamaican project

Rex Nettleford and the Jamaican project

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

<span style="font-size: 17pt">NETTLEFORD... argued that ways must be found to “decrease the hegemony of the entrenched business oligarchy” which is “overwhelmingly non-black” </span>

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.

<span style="font-weight: bold">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.
</span>
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".

<span style="color: #FF0000">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.</span>

<span style="font-weight: bold">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".</span>

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.

<span style="font-size: 17pt">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".</span><span style="font-size: 17pt">(a lot of Jamaicans still believe this foolishness on and off this board)</span>

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."

<span style="color: #FF0000">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.</span>

<span style="font-size: 17pt">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.
</span>
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.

LINK

**Peasie** · 02-09-2010, 02:17 PM

Re: Rex Nettleford and the Jamaican project

Wow. A man of great ideas. Not bad for a dancer.

Prof. Rex Nettleford heart attack in Washington, DC

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