KAMAU PLAYED A crucial role in returning me to myself, so to speak. I’d left Jamaica at age nine for Barbados. We are both—though of different eras—alumni of Harrison College. After Barbados, I spent five years at an English public (i.e., private) school. I was an outsider there, of course, though I enjoyed the experience, and England.
I returned to Jamaica at age nineteen with an English accent, and was plunged willy-nilly into the rumbar culture of the Sports Desk at the Daily Gleaner. I became the resident expert on rugby, which I had played at school in England—under the rubric of “the gentleman’s game,” soccer being the game for “yobs.” I was an outsider again, having been absent from the Caribbean for the seminal period of the teen years, when lifelong friendships are formed and cultural markers are established and infused.
By a circuitous route I ended up, in 1968, on the Mona Campus of the U.W.I., enrolled for what was called at the time a History Special degree. It was—as the ancient Chinese curse has it—“an interesting time” to be at Mona—indeed, to be in Jamaica. Classes were delayed for a couple weeks because the campus was locked down by students and lecturers protesting the government’s banning of Walter Rodney, for whose Introduction to African History class I had signed up.
Kamau, if memory serves, was new on staff, but his fame preceded him. Rights of Passage had been published in 1967 by Oxford University Press, a book that reputedly would—though few of us had copies—transform West Indian poetry. Word was that Oxford also had Kamau’s dissertation—what became The Development of Creole Society—which was going to rewrite West Indian historiography.
In time, of course, both these “words” became “flesh.” By then, Pam and I knew Kamau and Doris well. We both participated in Noel Vaz’s staging of Rights at the Creative Arts Centre, and to a subsequent taping at C.A.S.T. (the College of Arts, Science and Technology, now the University of Technology, Jamaica). That immersion led to Kamau’s words becoming part of our lived language.
It was inevitable that in my final year I would sign up for History, Society and Ideas in the Caribbean. It was a course that ignored academic boundaries, ranging far from the confines of historical dates/periods into the social sciences, anthropology (at that stage an esoteric discipline) as well as music and the plastic arts. Kamau taught—to the extent that he “taught” at all—from the middle. We were participants in the learning process. What we learnt was that—for all the differences of social class, background, preferences inhering in the twenty or so of us—we were part of a society. We were representative of West Indian society. That brought me home.
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Martin Mordecai is a writer, voracious reader, sometime photographer, father of three, grandfather of Zoey Rita, happy life partner (so far) of Pam.
