EDITORIAL - Olive Lewin's legacy

• Olive Lewin's legacy

In the harsh and brutish environment which some of today's citizenry have created by deviant behaviour, it is easy to forget that we are a people with an honoured past, whose multi-textured history makes us far more worthy than we are tempted to believe we are.

We have been blessed with a creative imagination and skills and talents which we ignore at our peril. We are at our best when we recognise that there have been still persons among us who believe in Jamaica enough to work to make it better.

Dr the Honourable Olive Lewin, whose life we celebrate, was born in the early part of the 20th century, when Jamaica was not yet a nation on its own. She entered the world into a family of upwardly mobile Jamaicans of colour, whose ancestors were not too far removed from the era of enslavement. Ambitious and prepared to work hard for change, the Lewins were educators, and Olive and her family grew up sensitised to learning and ambition to move forward.

Music studies took her to the United Kingdom for professional advancement. Her return to Jamaica in the late 1950s to early '60s was to a new nation, among whom was the first minister of culture who had a vision for preserving the past, while building the present and looking to the future. Edward Seaga invited Olive Lewin to join the team which he was building and so began her new career as an ethnomusicologist.

Preservation of folk culture

For half a century and more, the name Olive Lewin became synonymous with the preservation of folk culture, for respect for the best that was Jamaica and for honouring the ancestral legacy of the nation. Her work was hailed not only at home but abroad. Recognition by UNESCO, the culture arm of the United Nations system, reached an unprecedented level when she was made a member of the International Council for Traditional Music, one of the highest accolades given by the organisation.

She was honoured in many other ways, perhaps none greater than the respect and affection offered to her by the people of this nation as she moved among them as a true cultural ambassador, one who believed in who we are and who we still can be, when we remember that we have a heritage in which to take pride.

Besides the many accolades which have been delivered in her memory since her passing and the numerous awards listed in her biography, the best epitaph to her memory would be to ensure that a new generation of Jamaicans is grounded in knowledge of and respect for their heritage.

The voice of another cultural icon, the late Professor Rex Nettleford, used to speak much of "the coarsening of sensibilities", the rough edges which are carried into adulthood by our young people. Olive Lewin, too, had no patience with that.

The best memorial now would be to equip a new generation with the knowledge and skill to defend Jamaica's values and creative spirit and to preserve them in the name of all the cultural pioneers, the distinguished Dr the Hon Olive Lewin among them.

• Have you no shame, Mayor Harris?

Glendon Harris, the mayor of Montego Bay, may - but more likely not - have heard of Joseph Nye Welch.

Welch was a lawyer for the US Army during Senator Joe McCarthy's 1954 Communist witch-hunt hearings in America.

His importance to us now, and the context in which we bring him to the attention of Mr Harris, is his response to Mr McCarthy when the senator went after one of Welch's young law firm colleagues, Fred Fisher.

Welch shot back: "... Let us not assassinate the lad further, senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you no sense of decency?"

We thought about Welch's question to McCarthy against the backdrop of the quite obvious attempt of Mayor Harris to make a partisan political football of the plan, approved by his predecessors, to name the Corwnwall Regional Hospital after Dr Herbert Eldemire, the late former Jamaica Labour Party politician and health minister.

Dr Eldemire played a major role in the establishment of the hospital. But more important, he was one of those personalities who grew to transcend partisan politics. He became a national elder statesman. Mr Harris, of the People's National Party, is too ensconced in ignorance to appreciate this.

We understand the decision by the Eldemire family to withdraw his name. But decency says that they should be persuaded otherwise, or that attempt be made to heal their wounds.

That is the job of our prime minister, Mrs Portia Simpson Miller, if she does have it in her to become the post-partisan, non-tribal leader she promised to be.

Otherwise, Mr Harris will have spilt his shame on her leadership.

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