“Guerrillas in the Trenches”: Nettleford on Extra-Mural Studies at the UWI

Abstract

Introduction: Guerrillas in the trenchesGUERRILLAS IN THE TRENCHES: that is how Professor Rex Nettleford described the cadre of resident tutors, staff tutors and tutor/coordinators who created the link between the University of the West Indies (UWI) and its supporting countries within the framework of the social and economic development of those countries. Indeed, they were guerrillas in the trenches, for they were a small, intellectually mobile band of academics, educators and administrators, strategists and tacticians held together by unity of purpose and a determination to effect change through long, hard struggles against the regular forces of elitism, and on the terrain of education. It was on this terrain that Caribbean people would acquire consciousness of their social position, their history and their need to confront new challenges and embrace opportunities with confidence in order to ensure for themselves a future of social and economic well-being. In addition, this small band of extra-mural activists - for that is what they were, afflicted by the tyranny of distance1 - was called upon to perform multiple tasks: academic, administrative, advisory, bursarial and 'registrarial', in countries connected, but at the same time separated, by over two thousand miles of the same body of water, and in an institution bent on bringing a radicalised higher education to a people born and bred in the crucible of colonial ideology, attitudes, behaviours and social thought. Extra-mural studies, therefore, were a critical component of the UWI's project to liberate the descendants of slaves from the damning consequences of their history of dismemberment, discontinuity and continuity.Nettleford shared the view held by Paulo Freire that the social exclusion of the poor, blacks and the disadvantaged resulted directly from the whole experience of social, economic and political domination, consequences of colonialism, slavery and capitalism, which had reduced them to 'things' and mere objects of exploitation within a climate of oppression. It was an experience which had also pacified their critical reason by keeping them submerged in ignorance and a culture of silence.2 Nettleford's emphasis on extra-mural education, therefore, was but a first step in assisting these women and men to regain and reaffirm their humanity and to awaken their critical reason through the right kind of education. As Nettleford noted,Even the Department's early commitment to so-called courses did not fail to address the question, enrichment for what? Clearly it was to help its clientele (many of them without the benefit of high school education but with innate intelligence and talents) to make sense of their personal and social existence.3Nettleford continues:One only needs to remember that the knowledge economy bequeathed to the twenty-first century has little use for the sort of knowledge transmission that, according to Paulo Freire, is disconnected from life, centred on words, emptied of reality and lacking in concrete activity. For is this not the very idea that has guided The UWI's outreach (extra-mural) vision, mission and activity for all of sixty years?4This very idea that knowledge and its transmission are not an abstraction would urge the small, but effective, band of freedom fighters and liberators throughout the anglophone Caribbean to work towards unlocking the creativity and the potential of those women and men who entered the Extra Mural Department/Department of Extra-Mural Studies/School of Continuing Studies5 seeking self-dignity, a new awareness of self and the means to create a pathway to a new and worthwhile future.If we were guerrillas, then Professor Nettleford was the commandante who directed activity in the trenches, and the general to whom we all looked for guidance in an extra-mural experience which was rooted in the educational construct of the UWI from as early as 1947. …