To Sir with Love

There are people of many faiths gathered today in this cathedral. As my father would wish, I bid you a-Salaam Alykum, Namaste, Shalom, may the Lord be with you. Thank you all for coming to celebrate the life of Robert James Moore, my Dad; you have come from Britain, New York, Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa, Guyana, Jamaica and the Caribbean. And most of all you have braved the Santa Claus parade to be here today. You are a great comfort to our family. Dad must be pleased.

I have called these reflections: To “Sir with Love”. You will see why.

Born in 1931, into comfortable circumstances Dad was orphaned as a little boy. His American father disappeared when he was five, and his Mother left to find work overseas and was unable to return. Two great-aunts cared for him and then one died suddenly of filaria. All this before he was 12 years old.

Dad’s great-aunt Renee Shanks a seamstress and pianist sewed her fingers off and made them a very modest living. The Anglican Archbishop Alan Knight on a mission to educate promising young men stepped in and sent him to Central High School; and he fostered Dad’s profound Christianity and love of language.

Dad, having experienced poverty first hand, took up teaching as soon as he passed his junior Cambridge – beginning a long and happy life of tutoring. He was brilliant and eventually (to the chagrin of the more elite schools) won one of six inter-island scholarships to UCWI.

Appreciated even at school as a gifted tutor, he gained access to the households of Guyana’s six ethnic groups and three religions. Among his many pupils was young Miss Alyma Khan; as the story goes he escaped via a window when my devoutly Moslem grandfather noticed a strong attachment. He taught adult night school as well. Among his early protégés was the leader of a ring of purse snatchers/choke and rob. Decades later when he was High Commissioner to Canada, Dad was celebrated by that gentleman who had become a professor of criminology in the US.

The inter-island scholarship sent Dad on his way. He spent some of his happiest years at university in Jamaica becoming a Caribbean person, (and a prankster), astonished by the range and depth of Caribbean History and falling in love with Jamaica. He learned to laugh and developed an incredible joie de vivre.

He decided to teach for a living and became part of a Caribbean-wide movement of teachers, professors, artists and even economists who worked to decolonise Caribbean education and culture from its rigidly British and European focus. They didn’t know it then, but that movement gave voice to five million marginalized people, what after the Obama elections, is now famously called a “personal narrative”.

After Jamaica, Dad returned to Guyana and in the romance of the year, he eloped with young Alyma. My parents worked as teachers in the 1960s. They started their family (and supported their elders) just as Guyana was imploding along the great fault line of African/Indian rivalry.

Dad worked as a Master at Queens college and he taught from our Albertown flat as well, often for free. He educated students and also older folk, eager to do well in an economy of where chronic under-employment was the norm. As kids we didn’t know how successful those hoards of khaki-pants QC boys would become - people like Walter Rodney, Vibert Cambridge, Denis Ramharry. In the tributes that have poured in “generosity and unselfishness” predominate.

My parents were brave. As the politicians squandered the opportunities of independence they lived life. During an 80 day general strike my father taught students at our flat and Mom was scared. Mom once rescued a young man of one ethnicity from being lynched by a mob of another ethnicity – she hid him in the kitchen - and then Dad was scared. And every night one parent stood guard as the other slept ready to rescue their beloved children from fire or violence.

After independence, Dad pioneered Guyanese history as part of the Caribbean historical mosaic, at times literally wresting the past from the soil. He crawled under St George’s Cathedral to find old Parish records – including Bishop Austin’s letters; as Dean of the Department of History at the University of Guyana he became infamous when he sank thigh deep in mud while exploring the remnants of a seventeenth century Dutch factory. He sent legions of students with tape recorders into villages to collect the oral history of their elders’.

I discovered last year that in 1971, Dad discovered and had translated the letters lost for over two hundred years of Kofi, the leader of the great slave uprising of 1763 – one of the earliest, widespread slave rebellions in the hemisphere; it took place twenty-six years before the Haitian revolution.

My parents brought us up in both Islamic and Christian traditions. We had a culturally rich upbringing. I remember when Dad, introducing us to Hinduism, invited a student to douse us in powder during Pagwah – the festival of the Holi. He was mad when we ran into the bedroom. Ha! We seized Mom’s finest powder and covered the surprised student in sweet smelling lavender. He exited fast. Dad laughed, Mom not so much.

And the years went by. Dad was overjoyed as our family grew to five when Rayad was born. And Mom heroically obeyed Dad’s Burton-esque commands to pay, pack, follow some 10 times as we moved between Guyana, the UK, and Canada, as my father collected degrees, awards, distinctions.

There was a PhD from Sussex University that 40 years later still counts as one of the most authoritative works on race relations in the Caribbean: a High Commissionership in Canada, in which he used his skills in education to promote both Guyana and also the cause of economic justice between developed and developing countries and won the respect of Trudeau senior; and stints with the BBC and Radio Demerara. All this by age 48.

And then in the 1980s things fell apart. A few weeks after the assassination of the historian Walter Rodney my father had his first heart attack. Two years later Canadian doctors discovered that he had an acute form of arterial sclerosis. It made impossible a return to Guyana. And so thanks to the kindness of Canadians and the expertise of the University of Ottawa’s Heart Institute, the Moore family fell backwards into Ottawa.

It was a soft landing for someone starting again at 51. Dad worked at Carleton and at IDRC and at CIDA. We considered ourselves very lucky. We found ourselves in a prosperous, safe and generous country. But Ottawa in the early 1980s was still adjusting to a new bilingual world, and eccentric newbies with strong views from the global south raised eyebrows. It was a source of constant concern to him that in this town that had given him back his heart, he somehow couldn’t find his feet.

My parents’ marriage fell apart and for a while, Dad was lost in an emotional and professional wilderness.

But the old rogue wasn’t done yet. He got together with and married Barbara MacDonald Moore and again found joy in his personal life; he adored Denise and Martin, his stepchildren. Inspired by his new family, he wrote a book on Audacious Anglicans; became a member of the Anglican Primate’s Theological Advisory Council; and a mentor and advisor to a host of global education teachers, to young relatives and friends. He was loved and respected far more than he ever knew – as I discovered when I worked at CIDA. And as he faded away he received expert, humane and very loving care from family, friends and the medical establishment and the clergy.

And what of his work in the Caribbean? If you know your history then you will know where I am coming from! Ask the Queens College alumni in this church who they are! Since independence Caribbean culture once condemned as“low class and non-existent” has produced three Nobel laureates, a bunch of Booker prize winners, the steel band, Bob Marley, reggae and calypso, a host of successful professionals, legions of creative and environmentally sensitive young people all taught from a Caribbean syllabus.

A few years ago, I was travelling in a tiny bush plane back from the Rupununi savannahs in the deep south of Guyana to Georgetown on the coast. Next to me sat a little girl with long curly hair, flashing bright eyes and a smile that could melt an iceberg. She was in Guyanese parlance a Boviander, a mixed-race child of Amerindian and African descent from the deep south and probably as close to Brazilian as to Guyanese culture.

As we circled the coast with its long rectangular cane fields each field surrounded by miles and miles of canals, she said to me “who built all of those canals?” I almost said “the Dutch”. Instead I replied ponderously “That down there is a polder and it was built by African slaves, for their Dutch overlords.”

Big smile. “Oh yes” she said knowingly. “they taught us that in school”.

That to me is the essence of my father’s legacy.

Dad’s birthday is tomorrow. He would have been 84 and I have no doubt he is celebrating with his pals on a distant shore and conspiring to rescue silent planet.

Remember Dad that its important to rest in peace.

And gratitude and prayers from us all go out to you –

To OUR Sir with Love.