Tony Laing: A life that touched so many others

Rupert Lewis, Guest Columnist

Keith Anthony 'Tony' Laing was one of the founding members of the Friends of Liberty Hall in the late 1990s. He was a repository of many tales he had heard about the once-vibrant Liberty Hall from the 1920s to the 1940s when Liberty Hall had been an active centre for cultural, political and entrepreneurial activities of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League.

He helped to spearhead the efforts that led to the transformation of a derelict building into Liberty Hall - the Legacy of Marcus Garvey, an educational heritage site with a multimedia museum, and a library as part of its programme.

Laing worked closely with Ambassador Burchell Whiteman, then minister of education, and Ms Elaine Melbourne, then executive director of the Institute of Jamaica (IOJ), to put together a volunteer group to help raise funds and think about the programmes for the project.

He was sadly struck down in 2006 by multiple strokes, but as soon as he was stabilised, he insisted on attending an executive meeting of the Friends of Liberty Hall to affirm his commitment and contribute to its progress.

Tony was passionate about Marcus Garvey's teachings and its centrality to the development of Jamaican society and culture. In his popular programme 'Laing and Company' on Power 106 FM, he had a number of outside broadcasts at 76 King Street, thus bringing attention to the work being done by the team of the IOJ, led by Dr Donna McFarlane, director and curator of the multimedia museum. He helped to promote the programmes which served our schoolchildren and adults as well as those living in the neighbourhood of upper King Street.

Like the late Frank Gordon, another recently deceased Friend of Liberty Hall, Tony Laing grew up downtown, and in a 2003 interview, he described the Kingston of his early years in the 1950s as "clean and safe, people weren't afraid of each other, and it was a safe place to walk".

CONTRIBUTION TO MUSIC INDUSTRY

Tony was also an advocate of the development of downtown Kingston. From the east to the west of the city, many talented instrumentalists and singers, sound systems, selectors and deejays had emerged to define the cultural landscape of the island and global popular music. Laing had a good knowledge of the history of Jamaican music and he had learned much from his father, Denzil 'Pops' Laing, who was a percussionist and successful recording musician with Soul Vendors band at Studio One.

Tony Laing played a critical role in promoting the welfare of artistes arising from the 1993 Copyright Act, which legally empowered our artistes to secure copyright and intellectual property rights over their music.

He was a raconteur, a storyteller and a neologist. One of his neologisms was 'smaddification', which means the process of self-acceptance and the affirmation of one's self-worth. This idea was adopted and used by the late Rex Nettleford and other philosophers such as Professor Charles Mills, of Northwestern University, as a Jamaican ontological concept which countered the cultural alienation from one's African roots and the adoption of the ideas of self-debasement.

We will miss Tony Laing's wit, humour and straight talk and his advocacy for Garvey's ideas.

Professor Rupert Lewis is chairman of the Friends of Liberty Hall. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and rupertlew@gmail.com.