GUYANESE-BORN, Milton M. Drepaul, who taught in many schools and colleges across the Caribbean, passed away at a hospital in Toronto, Canada, on Monday, September 24th.
He was 74 years old.
Over more than five decades, Mr. Drepaul taught and worked in Guyana, Jamaica, Turks & Caicos, Anguilla, Barbados, Trinidad & Tobago, and Suriname. The thousands of students, including teachers, whom he taught and mentored over the years in the Caribbean are today scattered across the region, the hemisphere, and the world.
In early 1993, the current Prime Minister of Guyana – and the then Minister of Information, Moses Nagamootoo – appointed Mr. Drepaul to head of the Guyana Information Service (GIS). Until 1995, he served his country in this capacity, and effectively functioning as President Cheddi Jagan’s Media Advisor and Director of Information in the Office of the President. During the said term in office, Mr. Drepaul played a pivotal role in the establishment and branding of the first national television station in the nation, GTV 10, the forerunner of the current NCN Television on Homestretch Avenue.
Just prior to his return to Guyana in 1993, Mr. Drepaul had lived and labored tirelessly for six years as a Senior Lecturer in Communication & Public Relations for the College of Agriculture, Science and Education in Jamaica, and also as a Senior English Lecturer at Knox College. In the course of his decades- long career in education, Mr. Drepaul was Deputy Registrar for Syllabuses for the Caribbean Examination Council (CXC) – Barbados; Senior Lecturer and Deputy Principal at the Lillian Dewar College of Education (Guyana); Senior Lecturer at the Caribbean Institute of Language Studies (CARINLANGS, Suriname), and Lecturer in English & Research Writing at the Suriname Institute of Management Studies in Paramaribo.
A true son of the Caribbean, Milton Drepaul did his undergraduate studies at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica, matriculating with Honours in English in 1965. At UWI, he was a contemporary of Trinidad & Tobago’s-renowned Gordon Rohlehr, and Walter Rodney, with whom he sometimes wandered in the hills of Kingston, Jamaica.
Throughout his life, Mr. Drepaul had a deep passion for the spoken and written word. As a young student at UWI, he was Editor of the University’s ‘Rising Star’ – a weekly news magazine, and also the ‘Pegasus’ the literary magazine. Upon his return to Guyana in 1965, as a young English Teacher at Queen’s College – from which he had matriculated years earlier – Mr Drepaul actively supervised productions of the Queen’s College ‘Magazine’, and the ‘Lictor’ newspaper. He also served in a similar capacity for the Queen’s College Debating Society, Theatre Society, and the Photographic Club.
The themes of lucid writing, creative linguistic expression and publications would persist throughout Mr. Drepaul’s life. In the 1980s, he co-authored two English textbooks which are still widely used today among students preparing for CXC English examinations. And after the turn of the new century, he embarked on a publishing venture in neighboring Suriname. DVDs, CDs and books are among the productions of that initiative. Mr. Drepaul was especially fond of: ‘Msiba’ by Ivan Khayiat, the winner of the Rabindranath Tagore national poetry competition; ‘Muruscape: The Splendour That is Suriname (Celebrating 40 Years of Independence), an artistic collection of water colour paintings executed by Indian born artist, Dr. A. Murugesan from Chennai, India; and ‘Freedom: Reconnecting our People’, the soon-to-be-released visually-attractive, graphic re-publication of Walter Rodney’s ‘Groundings’.
Mr. Drepaul closed his teaching career at the AlphaMax Academy in Paramaribo, Suriname, where he served from 2007-2015, as the Director of the Global Assessment Certificate (GAC) programme. The GAC programme is an ACT International Education Solutions program, which is moderated in Australia and Shanghai, China.
In June 2018, Mr. Drepaul visited Suriname for the last time, to attend the Academy’s graduation ceremonies for the Class of 2018. It was a non-coincidence that the keynote speaker for this event was the Director-General of Tourism in Guyana, Donald Sinclair. Mr. Drepaul sat on the Academy’s rostrum in silent admiration as Donald Sinclair (also a UWI graduate), one of his former students at Queen’s College, Guyana, delivered the graduation address at an institution that he also served at, committed to excellence, and founded by another former student and broadcast-media colleague.
By no means confined to the expected or prescribed areas of his scholastic expertise, Mr. Drepaul played a pivotal and influential role in the spawning and flowering of a brilliant and innovative music school in Toronto, Canada: the Kendrum Music Academy in Brampton, Ontario, which has at its helm, Guyanese- born Caribbean musician and music teacher, Kenton Wyatt. Mr. Drepaul was the Patron and Business Advisor to the Kendrum Music Academy. In December 2016, he attended the Academy’s last Christmas Recital in Ontario.
For old-timers, the foregoing snippet of Mr. Drepaul comes as no surprise, for they will readily recall that in the early 1970s, he served Guyana as a member of the National History & Arts Council, working assiduously alongside cultural notables like A.J. Seymour and Celeste Dolphin in the monumental preparations and execution of the very first Carifesta that was inaugurated in 1972 by the host, Guyana, under the distinguished auspices of then Prime Minister, Forbes Burnham.
Based on accounts of parting conversations with close colleagues and friends, it must be stated that until the end of his life, Mr. Drepaul personally devoted himself to the inspiration and enlightenment of Caribbean scholars, regardless of age, class, clime or origin – whether at home or in the diaspora. He often quoted with deep fondness the words of C.L.R. James, the Caribbean scholastic titan, whom he met as a young impressionable UWI student in Jamaica: “Never be ashamed of the countries you come from – whether they are large or small, because one of the great civilisations of this epoch, the Greeks, came from tiny islands in the Mediterranean. As Caribbean people we can similarly shape the destiny of the entire world through the power of the ‘word’.” Inspired by his meritorious example and with renewed dedication and fortitude, let us, who are still on the beach of human time, plough forward in the tasks of the education of the young in this blessed Caribbean region of ours.
