Person in the News: Rex Nettleford

Ralston Milton Nettleford, who will receive the Order of the Caribbean Community - CARICOM's highest award - in July, was born in the north-eastern Jamaican town of Falmouth on February 3, 1933.

A scholar, social critic and choreographer, Professor Rex Nettleford as he is best known, is the former Vice-Chancellor of the University of the West Indies (UWI).

A leading Caribbean intellectual, he received his early education at the Cornwall College in Montego Bay, and earned a degree in History at the University College of the West Indies before attending Oxford University in Britain as a Rhodes Scholar.

In 1975, he received the National Honour of Order of Merit (OM), the Gold Musgrave medal from the Institute of Jamaica and the Living Legend Award from the Black Arts Festival in Atlanta, USA.

In 1994, he received the Zora Neale Hurtson-Paul Robertson Award for Outstanding Scholarly Achievement from the National Council for Black Studies in the USA.

Professor Nettleford has written number books, including "Manley and the New Jamaica"; "The African Connexion"; "In Our Heritage", and "Caribbean Cultural identity, the Case of Jamaica".

The book,"Mirror, Mirror" provides an insight into life in Jamaica during the 1960s.

Apart from his work in academia, he founded the Trade Union Education Institute, allowing for factory and farm workers to unite with scholars to help bridge the education gap between the classes.

In 1963, he became the co- founder, artistic director, choreographer and lead dancer with the National Dance Theatre Company of Jamaica and used this forum to introduce several movements to Jamaica, such as, Kumina and Pocomania.

Although highly educated and versed in the social mores and language of the British imperial crown, Professor Nettleford never lost sight of his commitment to his native home and the promotion of its national vernacular culture.

At a time when the country's most talented and educated peoples were being siphoned off to fill the ivory towers and corporate offices in the metropolis, Professor Nettleford returned to his homeland and launched a public intellectual and artistic career whose effects reverberated throughout the Caribbean basin and its diasporic communities.

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