Rex Nettleford is dead

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WASHINGTON DC (GaeaTimes.com) — Professor Rex Nettleford, ex vice-chancellor at the University of the West Indies has passed away. Nettleford died last night at the George Washington University Hospital in Washington DC, six days after collapsing in a US hotel.

Unfortunately, Rex Nettleford, 76 would turn 77 today.

Nettleford was undergoing treatment for catastrophic brain injury, which he suffered following a cardiac arrest last Wednesday. He was unconscious and in a coma for many days. He had been on life support system in the Intensive Care Unit.

The 76 year-old Nettleford was born on February 3, 1933. He was a Jamaican scholar, social critic as well as a choreographer. He has been the artistic director for the University Singers of the University of the West Indies, Mona campus in Jamaica.

Nettleford was a recipient of the 1957 Rhodes Scholarship to Oriel College, Oxford. He returned to Jamaica in the early 1960s to take up a position at the University of the West Indies. At the UWI he first came to attention as a co-author (with M.G. Smith and Roy Augier) of a groundbreaking study of the Rastafari movement in 1961.

In 1963 he founded the National Dance Theatre Company of Jamaica, an ensemble which under his direction did much to incorporate traditional Jamaican music and dance into a formal balletic repertoire.

In 1996, he became Vice-Chancellor of the UWI, and held that office until 2004, when he was succeeded by E. Nigel Harris.

We are grief stricken by the sudden demise of the versatile man. Our condolences goes to his bereaved family, friends and students.