Sir Philip Sherlock: Founder and First Editor of "Caribbean Quarterly"Author(s): REX NETTLEFORDSource: Caribbean Quarterly, Vol. 54, No. 1/2, The 60th Anniversary Edition: Literature andIdeas (March - June, 2008), pp. 191-194Published by: University of the West Indies and Caribbean QuarterlyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40655184 .

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Sir Philip Sherlock : Founder and First Editor of Caribbean Quarterly

REXNETTLEFORD

Almost anything that I say about Sir Philip Sherlock would be to gild the anthurium - the anthurium being the gift of a life of hope and fulfillment creatively crafted and deftly lived as part of a process of transformation, growth and

development of an entire society in quest of itself, of its reason for being, for over half a century.

Philip Manderson Sherlock had been at the beginning, since the late

Thirties, of all the great challenges facing the people of our groping West Indies -

whether it be the call for self-government followed by the birth-pangs of a society in protracted labour or the halting courtship leading to an attempt at union, or the

bringing forth, complete with primal screams, of so many Independent nations

starting with his own native Jamaica and her sister twin-island state of Trinidad and Tobago in 1962.

A persistent advocate of West Indian integration even in the face of the ill-fated Federation of 1958-61, Sir Philip has lived to see the light rekindled and the hope restored in the hearts of a new generation which remains the legatee of the vision he had for our Caribbean people in the surge towards a definitive civilisation. For him, as for other founding fathers, the twilight of colonialism was to herald a light rising from the West. "Oriens ex Occidente Lux. Everywhere else it rises from the East. Trust us in our determination to be different, special and

unique!

Lord Milverton who, as Sir Arthur Richards the British Governor who detained trade unionist Alexander Bustamante and other radicals in 1939/1940. told me while I was researching the early self-goverment movement in Jamaica, that on being instructed "by savingram" from the British Colonial Office to

proceed to Jamaica and "restore Order", he arrived in the island with characteristic

gubernatorial ardour intent on teaching the troublemakers a lesson. To his amazement he found alongside the fiery and remarkable Bustamante and a few

"egg-heads" like Dick Hart and Frank Hill, a highly sophisticated society with

people like the renowned lawyer N.W. Manley and bright young community leaders. Among these he singled out a "bright young man named Phillip

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Manderson Sherlock". That bright young man had progressed to being the Vice Chancellor of the independent University of the West Indies at the time Lord Milverton was relating this story.

None of this should be surprising, for Sir Philip was a great spirit, the avatar of all that gives force, purpose, life, hope and meaning to the turbulence, contradictions and chaosof our multi-sourced existence. He belonged to the chosen few the West Indies was lucky to have had at the helm of its social revolution - the chosen few who believed that the intractable problems of

underdevelopment and the attendant immiseration of the mass of the population had to be met by the empowerment of our people through the exercise of their intellect and their creative imagination. So he himself has been poet as well as

historian, policy-determiner as well as classroom teacher, social worker and

philosopher as well as administrator and man of public affairs.

It is this call for texture rooted in a deep understanding of the need to inform intellectual pursuits with the arts of the imagination, which enriched the operation of the University of the West Indies from its fledgeling years. As a founding father, he actually helped to establish and administer the institution as its first Vice

Principal and Director of Extra Mural Studies. By the time he became Vice Chancellor, after tending the establishment of the St. Augustine branch of the

UWI, the Sherlock vision of the creative arts and the humanities acting as catalyst for intellectual pursuits and remaining handmaiden to the science and technology branches of knowledge, was well established.

He institutionalised the vision partly through the introduction of a creative arts plank in the outreach work of his Extra Mural Department with the

appointment of Staff Tutors in Drama along with counterparts in Social Work, Trade Union Education and Radio Education laying the foundations for degree programmes in Sociology and Social work, in Industrial Relations and related Social Science studies and in Mass Communications. And he eventually established the Creative Arts Centre on the Mona Campus (others have since been established at Cave Hill and St. Augustine) to enrich the quality of life and to

engage the aesthetic sensibility of members of the University and the wider

community. The rest is history.

The rest is history indeed! In 1997 he co-authored with Dr. Hazel Bennett The Story of the Jamaican People published by Ian Rändle Publishers. At the ripe age of 95, Sir Phillip re-affirmed his long-held belief that until the centrality of the African Presence in the Caribbean ethos is recognised and accepted, there can be no sense of self or purpose among the majority of people who tenant his Jamaica

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and the rest of the insular Caribbean. It did not mean for him the laying of

exaggerated claims by one set of West Indians over all others. Judging from his

life-long work in education, community development, Caribbean regionalism and Caribbean culture, his appreciation and respect for the common struggles shared

by the early Sephardic arrivants as well as later arrivants "from India, China, and Lebanon and others after them in defining self and society, is clearly evident and

beyond question. But he saw the need to find urgent resolution for the original battle for space between Africa and Europe as the dominant mode of "becoming in the region, if the creative potential of the West Indian people are to be unleashed in the service of their own development.

A history of the Jamaican people "from an African- Jamaican [rather than

from] a European point of view" he therefore saw as necessary to advance the discourse or at least to get the story of scattering, exile, and survival into

perspective. Phillip Sherlock gave some commentators anxious moments. His

advocacy of the celebration of the African Presence had even earned him at his

great age the description of "irresponsible revolutionary".

Knowing him, he would be delighted by such a put-down from detractors for he was convinced that it was "the African- Caribbean people [who] laid the foundation for a rich culture by retaining their sense of spiritual values, by creating a vivid creole language, preserving their natural love for drama, music, song, drumming, for laughter sympathy and wit. They created religious cults and modes of self-expression and developed an internal marketing system based, in the early years, on provision grounds on marginal land, and on a network of Sunday markets and higglers.

Sir Phillip belonged to that generation of West Indians who believed that

any change from colonial life to self-reliant nationhood had to be done via "change from within" - the designation he gave to a project he master-minded among inner-city schools in urban Jamaica in the Nineties. He acknowledged the pivotal role of those who exercise imagination and intellect in the shaping of a modem

society insisting that his latest book was, in his own words, merely a contribution to work already "begun by our artists, poets, writers, carvers, athletes, reggae musicians, the dub poets, rastafarians, the scholars, members of the public and

private sectors and political parties who are dedicated to building a better society.

The implications for the wider Caribbean are self-evident: A better Caribbean will indeed come if West Indian people begin to treasure their story. This fits into his early vision of the mandatory development of indigenous institutions like the ill-fated Federation which lasted a mere three years, the

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Caribbean Community (Caricom) which has provided one viable alternative to the

region's failed attempts to unite politically, the Caribbean Association of Universities and Research Institutes (UNICA) which sought to mobilise the intellect of the region into collaborative action, and his beloved University of the West Indies which not only predated the Federation but survived it and has maintained its pledge to invest intellectual pursuits with an aesthetic sensibility rooted in the arts of the imagination forged in the crucible of Caribbean experience and lived reality.

Whether we have done justice to this particular dream of Sir Philip we must leave to history to judge. But while we continue in our efforts to attain cultural certitude and intellectual independence, we dare not forget the faith in self and

society that his iconic presence provided succeeding generations of the likes of theatre artist Errol Hill and, poet-historian Kamau Brathwaite and Noel Vaz the first tutor in Drama at the then Creative Arts Centre, Mona, Louise Bennett the folklorist, anthropologist M.G. Smith, novelist George Lamming and the Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott, the talents of all of whom he was among the first to

recognise, to acknowledge, and to facilitate on their way to full flowering.

What was once said of Walcott can be said of Sir Philip, for they are kindred

spirits. "For Walcott's 'Adamic' man the past of motive and event is not as crucial, not as creative a force, as his renewed vision and elation in the New World. Rather than a creature riveted to his past, he is a man capable of inhabiting any historical moment unencumbered by time, and because he is absolved from the of the old worlds, he is able to recreate the entire order from religion to the simplest domestic rituals. This was the transforming and creative process by which the New World slave has yielded his own past, invested the acquired Christian tradition with a new feeling and faith and began the new naming of things in the New World. " For Sir Philip, as for Derek Walcott, "this effort of creation, with its force of revelation and its particular sensibility, is the essence of history in the West Indies". The work in the Centre for the Creative Arts named after him on the Mona Campus is intended to catch, energise and celebrate that essence.

We give thanks for the life of this great prophet, patriot, scholar, cultural icon and humanist. We shall miss him more than memory.

(From the Foreword ) - Vol.46, Nos.3&4, Sept. -December, 2000

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