TRIBUTE TO PROFESSOR JAN CAREW Guyana's Ministry of Culture earlier Friday issued the following statement in tribute to Professor Carew who last visited Guyana in the mid 1990s for an event that had been organised by the Association of Caribbean Studies (ACS). Just a few days ago, the Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sport was moved to remark on the fact that this leap year of 2012 has taken quite a few creative Guyanese minds from us. From entertainment promoters to choreographers, musicians and vocalists to broadcasters and journalists, the exodus to a higher calling was evident and significant. It was therefore our pleasure and privilege to host an outstanding literacy son of the soil, the centurion-author E.R. Braithwaite, a few months ago. Against that reflection the Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sport now pays tribute and bids farewell to another internationally-recognised Guyanese writer, poet and essayist, Jan Carew. Though Mr. Carew has spent most of his adult life away from his homeland, his varied volume of work has depicted Guyana and the Caribbean, securing the region's literary legacy amongst the international literary and academic landscape. As playwright and educator also, Jan Carew wrote landmark novels - Black Midas, Wild Coast - set - in Guyana, the Caribbean, Europe and elsewhere. He has written for children, for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and for the British and Caribbean Pan Africanist Movement. Carew has been describe as "the Gentle Revolutionary" for his work in promoting Black activism alongside such stalwarts as W.E.B. DuBois, Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes, Cheikh Anta Diop, Kwame Nkrumah and his countryman Ivan Van Sertima, to name just a few. The Guyanese intellectual from Agricola must also be regarded as a citizen of the world living and producing work from bases in some ten countries across the globe. The Ministry also notes Carew's earlier political and philosophical forays culminating perhaps, in his 1964 "Moscow Is Not My Mecca". It is recorded that Carew's numerous academic work - research papers, reviews theses and assays - reflected his determination to re-examined and present alternatives to the Westernised "traditional historiographies and prevailing historical models of the conquest of the Americans". Carew's works, along with Van Sertima's, are scholarly evidence of Guyanese contributions to the Third World mental re-orientation. The ministry therefore offers condolences to the Carew family and all his international colleagues in the literary and academic world. "The Guyanese Wanderer" (2007) must be continuing his life's work at a Higher Level. .