PROFESSOR REX NETTLEFORD WAS not only my first supervisor in University of West Indies (UWI), he was first person I met when I entered grounds of UWI's Trade Union Education Institute (TUEI) on a bright July morning in 1974. Then, I saw dapper Ralston Milton Rex Nettleford for first time. Over years, it became obvious that not only was he stylish in fashion, but he was also 'stylish' in his outstanding intellectual contribution to academia, in his creative manipulation of English language, in his role as a cultural icon, in his ideological exposition on race, class and gender and corresponding issues of liberation and dominance as he interrogated Jamaica's and region's socio-history, born of experience of a plantation society and a plantation mentality. In respect of race, an issue so carefully avoided by most in discussions, analyses and policy directions inside and outside of academy, Prof would often address those who gathered to hear him speak, as Quality Blacks. Embracing black nationalism, and, no doubt, Black Power of 1960s, Nettleford carried his race and colour proudly, encouraging others to do likewise. His concern for less privileged led him to support a national social agenda of change for peoples of his native Jamaica who were all from can epiece, as he constantly reminded us.A central theme in Nettleford's works, therefore, is emancipation. For him, emancipation was not just about freeing enslaved African from drudgery and bondage. It was about freeing mind from negative effects of a socialisation process of British deculturisation and acculturation which left black person with feelings of self-hate, self-negation, disunity, divisiveness and a psychological dependence on white man. Emancipation was also about releasing creative energies of a people seeking personhood and nationhood.However, it was in our interaction as colleagues and friends that I came to understand his passion for liberation of Quality Blacks. For Nettleford, emancipation did not start and end on ? August 1838 (or 1834 in some countries). For him, emancipation was an ongoing dynamic process which involved liberation from historical and contemporary bondage brought on by white supremacy. Little wonder, then, that his life's work centred on issues of race, culture, identity, class, and contemporary emancipation from vestiges of slavery and colonialism. His recognition that education would encourage appreciation and respect for self and would effect a socially transformed Caribbean society through a process of re-education for de-colonisation and synthesis - the melody of Europe, rhythm of Africa - was basic to his very being. This meant liberation of all Jamaicans; as he said, One thing is certain: there must be liberation of Jamaican black, whether he be peasant, proletarian or struggling middle class, from chains of self-contempt, self-doubt and cynicism. Correspondingly, there will have to be liberation of Jamaican whites, real and functional, from bondage of a lop-sided creole culture which tends to maintain for them an untenable position of privilege.1 Clearly, Nettleford believed that synthesis of melody and rhythm, freedom from notion of one being better than other, would become a reality; this, I believe, was his hope for harmony.It is also in this context that he believed that education was solution to prejudice, snobbery, poverty, disrespect; it was inoculation for ills of colonisation that would lead to full emancipation. It was an education which was non-elitist in content and form and which would engender action, reflection and analysis within context of a transported people, thereby generating respect for, and integration of, our various cultures. In this process, it was necessary for self-liberation to precede social liberation. Nettleford lived in conviction that self-emancipation was only meaningful emancipation, and that all people, women and men, should be equipped, through education, to liberate themselves from psychological and social scourges of a past rooted in soil of colonial domination and cultured in incubator of plantation society. …