A message from the Chair
This section was first started by Richard Bourne to give a monthly update for readers and supporters of The Round Table journal on developments leading up to the centenary celebrations of our journal (started in the Edwardian era).
Due to its popularity, it is now being continued by the new Chair of the editorial advisory board, (known since the early twentieth century as the Moot), Stuart Mole.
View the messages by selecting any of the links below:
December 2011
The inaugural Rex Nettleford Memorial Lecture
As the year draws to its close, I am in Oxford. It is late afternoon and already dark, the damp gloom punctuated by Christmas lights. Following a once-familiar route down the Banbury and Parks Roads, I arrive on the steps of Rhodes House. Its grand portico and imposing rotunda suggest more than a meeting place for the Rhodes Trust and its scholars (of which there have been over 7000 since 1903). Designed by Sir Herbert Baker, the building is also a grand memorial to its benefactor, the diamond magnate and imperial visionary, Cecil Rhodes.
The evening belongs to the Caribbean, however. Sir Shridath 'Sonny' Ramphal, the former Foreign Minister of Guyana and one-time Commonwealth Secretary-General, is due to pay tribute to his great friend, Rex Nettleford. The occasion is the inaugural Rex Nettleford Memorial Lecture - he died last year – and Rhodes House is a fitting location for such an event. Rex Nettleford was himself a Rhodes Scholar and in 2003 – to mark the centenary of the scholarships – Rex was one of only four former scholars honoured by Oxford University and by the Trust. Don Markwell, the current Warden of Rhodes House, opens by reminding the gathering of Rex Nettleford's citation: "a Vice-Chancellor, a man of great versatility: effective in action, outstanding in erudition, and most supple in the dance"
For Sonny Ramphal, Nettleford was a 'rare incandescent eagle', soaring to the heights of excellence in so many fields – educator and scholar; dancer and choreographer; author and speaker; administrator and institution-builder; internationalist and campaigner for social and cultural rights.
The single driving purpose in all this, argues Sonny, was Rex's belief in the validity and importance of the Caribbean person, an identity Nettleford did so much to foster as Vice-Chancellor of the University of the West Indies. And this objective – the fulfilling of a Caribbean identity - is the theme of Sonny's memorial lecture. He sees many of his fellow West Indians "so preoccupy themselves with island home that together they are losing their vision and abandoning their project of a Caribbean homeland".
Sonny himself found the collapse of the West Indies Federation in 1962 a 'wrenching experience'. He admitted leaving Trinidad and Tobago the night before independence because he could not bear to take part in celebrations which were a denial of the greater dream of Caribbean unity. It was, he admitted "a supreme moment of island nationalism", emerging not from a gallant struggle for freedom but from "the dismal failure of regional unity".
After the rejection of federalism, there has been, argues Sonny, a 'fragile regionalism', seeking co-operation over what he describes as "our natural archipelagic instincts for contrariness and fragmentation". The results have been disappointing, with a governance deficit at both the national and, in particular, regional level in the Caribbean. Just as the Federation's collapse was in considerable part due to a failure of leadership, so national leadership falters still, reinforcing "the separateness of a dividing sea". The Caribbean people as a result, asserts Sonny, have grown up largely as strangers, looking more to their respective (ex-colonial) metropoles than to each other: or in his words: "neighbours - each looking beyond our Caribbean neighbourhood".
What was slightly surprising, after such a sombre assessment, was that Sir Shridath should have pointed to the European Union as a source of inspiration and hope. It is true that, in many important respects, the unity of Europe has deepened and widened over the last fifty years. But Europe, too – many would argue - has a growing democratic deficit; in national governments and their relations with the Union, and in the institutions of Europe themselves. The current Eurozone crisis is as much a crisis of politics as it is of economics – and the British Prime Minister's veto of further treaty change a stark reminder that, in the UK at least, insularity readily trumps solidarity.
Stuart Mole