Rex Nettleford

Ralston Milton Nettleford was born on the third of February 1933 at the village of Bunkers Hill in the parish of Trelawny, Jamaica, the only son of Lebert Nettleford — a small subsistence farmer — and Lebertha Vivian Nettleford. The Nettleford household was a substantial-poor Black peasant family of the Trelawny limestone hills. He attended the Bunkers Hill Primary School through his eleventh year. He took the Trelawny Parish Scholarship to the Cornwall College at Montego Bay in 1944 — at eleven, the only Black peasant child in the cohort. He completed Cornwall in 1949 and took the bachelor's at the University of the West Indies at Mona from 1953 to 1956. He completed the master's at Oriel College, Oxford, in 1959 on a Rhodes Scholarship — the second Jamaican Rhodes Scholar.

He joined the Department of Extra-Mural Studies of the University of the West Indies at Mona in 1959 and remained at UWI for the following fifty-one years.

He co-founded with the choreographer Eddie Thomas in August 1962 — three weeks after Jamaican independence — the National Dance Theatre Company of Jamaica. He directed the NDTC for the following forty-six years. The Company's repertoire — drawing the Jamaican folk-dance survivals he had collected from the Trelawny and Saint Mary parishes through the 1950s, combined with the modern-dance training he had taken at the Sigmund Romberg Studios in London — established Jamaica as the principal centre of Caribbean theatrical-dance after the Beryl McBurnie (placed in this archive) Little Carib of the previous generation.

He published as cultural historian eight monographs across the 1960s and 1970s — Roots and Rhythms of 1969, Mirror, Mirror of 1970, Caribbean Cultural Identity of 1978 — that constitute the principal Anglo-Caribbean cultural-theoretical canon of the period. His co-edited 1960 University of the West Indies Mona Report on the Ras Tafari Movement was the first scholarly study of Rastafarianism.

He served as Vice-Chancellor of the University of the West Indies from 1998 to 2004 and as Chancellor of the University from 2008.

He died of a heart attack at Washington on the second of February 2010, at seventy-six.

He is honored here as the founder of the National Dance Theatre of Jamaica.