Dr D.K. Duncan was a phenomenal man

THE EDITOR, Madam:

I AM truly amazed by the accomplishments and subsequent self-actualisation of Dr David Keith Duncan, affectionately called D.K., from a series of articles I read on October 6 about the stalwart. D.K. was really an outstanding Jamaican, who was optimally geared in his search for his life’s dreams. This Jamaican, who was a pillar of the People’s National Party (PNP) throughout his adult years, was an avid sport aficionado. He was a very prolific batsman and bowler in his early years at Jamaica College, where he won the 1958 Sunlight Cup for schoolboy cricket supremacy. Dr Duncan was a great academic who studied dentistry at McGill University, and came back to Jamaica well armed for nation-building.

He set his early advocacy in the preserving of the right of the poor, disenfranchised, downtrodden, destitute and have-nots within our midst. D.K., as a young man in his prime, joined the PNP, as a strategic method he envisioned he could use to attain his desired prerequisites. He stated out soliciting help from a communist ideology, wherein he thought he could help the masses to shed themselves of poverty. D.K. made no qualms about his true agenda; as such, he was recruited by Michael Manley to help in his democratic socialism philosophy, which he embraced most glowingly. As a strategist, he was given the requisite guideline, to organise and manage the election campaign of 1966-1967. In the mid-1960s, he joined the Black Power Movement, and was a firm advocate against extrajudicial killings and the protection of the human rights of all Jamaicans.

He was declared national organiser of the PNP’s political campaign in 1972.

In 1976, he was given the added responsibility of minster of mobilisation and human resources by the then leader of the PNP, Michael Manley. This was to ensure that the PNP could strategise how to deal with the International Monetary Fund. He ran for and won the seat in East Central St Andrew in 1976, and again in 1980. D.K. became a part of the Electoral Advisory Committee for the PNP in 1981.

After leaving politics in the early 1980s, he came back and vied for the Eastern Hanover seat which he won in 2007, and won in the election of 2011 again. To say he was merely great is a blatant understatement, and a misuse of the word to describe this man. He was a phenomenal man with the greatest of integrity and patriotism.