EDITORIAL: Professor Chevannes - a lifetime of service

Once again, the intellectual community of Jamaica and the wider Caribbean has lost one of its leaders. The death on Friday of Professor Emeritus Alston Barrington Chevannes, coming after the passing in February of Professor Rex Nettleford, is a double loss for the region. Prof Chevannes, more popularly known as 'Barry', was only recently bestowed with The Gleaner Lifetime Award.

This was given in recognition of his multifaceted contribution to academia through his capacity for research into issues of social concern, his willingness to give public service, his creative spirit as a writer and performer of conscious lyrics, and his overall vision for what Jamaica could be if the lessons of the arts, with its multiple disciplines, were woven into the fabric of community and national life.

Not to "gild the anthurium", as his friend and mentor Prof Nettleford would have said, Barry Chevannes added his own lustre to campaigns for the upliftment of Jamaican men in the role of fathers, generally judged by the stereotype of fecklessness and careless relations with their children and partners. He insisted on separating the good from the bad and lifted them up through the organisation which he helped to found and name Fathers Inc.

His studies and publications on the Rastafari movement earned him the respect of the group often treated as outcasts. He was a primary participant in getting the University of the West Indies (UWI) to accept on the campus the Rastafari Conference, which brought together academics to give serious thought and attention to its unique expressions of the African and Jamaican pilgrimage.

Remove barriers

He was a pivotal influence in the UWI's Township programme, which included the thrust to remove barriers between the Mona campus and the community of adjacent August Town, declaring the latter the "UWI's seventh hall of residence", and proclaiming "there should be no barrier between a world of knowledge and a world of people hungry for knowledge".

It is this sensitivity, an implicit belief that much of what ails Jamaica can be healed by understanding of and respect among the multiple strands of a society, which made his an important voice of reason. He was willing also to mediate in the sometimes acrimonious, often demanding but never unimportant challenge of helping to build a society grounded on faith in its people. In this regard, he served successive governments in undertaking studies and research into issues such as violence and its consequences, and the perennial debate about ganja and its effects on the Jamaican psyche.

A quote from The Gleaner Honour Award citation encapsulates the measure of this man who could as easily sing a song of a Baby Jesus born in a tenement yard, or with equal facility, challenge academics to deeper thought. The words were his own:

"The way of life of the arts is diametrically opposed to the way of life of the gun. We need to turn to the arts more than ever these days for a softening among our people, for God knows, we need more softness of hands and hearts."

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