They gave my friend a state funeral, after he had suffered years of persecution

Rarely is there ever a coherent embrace between the personal and the political. My friend and comrade Leonard Tim Hector, as I briefly reported last week, died aged 59 from a lifelong heart condition on 12 November. He was buried in St John's, Antigua's capital, on 19 November.

I met Tim 25 years ago, when I visited Antigua in search of Caribbean contacts after being appointed editor of Race Today. He had co-founded a newspaper, Outlet, which repeatedly highlighted political corruption. He accused the then government, among other things, of plundering the treasury and of allowing Antigua to be used as a staging post for sending arms to a Colombian drugs cartel. He lost his job as a school teacher (all the children in the capital went on strike in protest); he was imprisoned; his printing press was destroyed on two occasions; he lost his wife when an assailant chopped her head off. But he never succumbed.

Two years ago, he declared, to my utter surprise, that he would co-operate with the government because Antigua was too small for adversarial politics. He became an unpaid adviser on regional affairs to the prime minister, Lester Bird.

Upon his death, the government declared a state funeral for this man, who had been persecuted for so many years. Several of his comrades in adversity, including myself, attended. We were declared VIP guests and were treated as such.

George Odlum, a former government minister in St Lucia, now stricken with cancer, stood up on his dying feet to speak under the advertised heading of "reflections".

He thundered, again and again, the rhetorical question: "Were you there when . . . ?" And he itemised each incident in the history of Tim's oppression. The prime minister sat next to him, transfixed. Odlum finally fixed a stare on the coffin, saying softly: "See you soon, my friend."

The prime minister then lambasted the opposition, including the BBC, which he had recently sued successfully for libel. The crowd hissed and groaned at his intemperate intervention.

Two days after the funeral, a calypsonian who goes by the sobriquet Obstinate produced a record titled "Were You There?", using much of Odlum's speech. And guess what is now the popular greeting between citizens all over Antigua? "Were you there?"

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website