Rex Nettleford, Contributor
NETTLEFORD
EDWARD PHILLIP George Seaga, former MP, former Prime Minister of Jamaica and until recently Leader of the Opposition, has now demitted office and, in his own words
to Parliament, has lit his
candle, sung his sankey and is about to go back home. That home is undoubtedly his Jamaica the wider one which afforded him ideal form and purpose for all his adult life and not Tivoli Gardens, the West Kingston enclave in which he has indeed been master of all he surveyed for over four decades.
A room in that wider home is the University of the West Indies (UWI), where he will get the opportunity as he deservedly does, to research, reflect on, and disseminate through his writings and active discourse the lived reality of his long years in public life as well as of earlier times when he investigated the cultural expressions of the people from below not only in their religious rituals but also their musical expressions and their philosophy and way of life all of which prepared him for the political life he led in subsequent years.
GOOD FOR THE FUTURE
It is the job of a university to capture all bodies of knowledge that can serve future generations and Edward Seaga's journey back home will facilitate the process of collection, storage and retrieval which defines, determines and delineates the world of learning. His journey and sojourn in this new 'non-political' (read non-partisan non-tribal) world augurs nothing but good for the future. It would be irresponsible for a university to lose or
wilfully ignore such possibilities.
As I have had reason to say back in 1999, Edward Philip George Seaga, like so many people of substance, has almost from day one of his 40-year political career attracted controversy. And, like many a public activist, he is not short of "reliable
