There is an old saying that youth is wasted on the young. In one of his greatest hits, Brother David stressed the importance of experience, in a song titled just that — “Experience”.

    I’ve told you before that in British Honduras when my post-World War II generation was growing up, we felt anonymous as a people, left out of the rest of the region and the world. The successes of the West Indies cricket team, beginning in the 1950s, did nothing that positive for our self-esteem, because no Belizean played on those teams. Because we were such a nonentity back in those days, the triumphs of boxer Ludwig Lightburn, his fights broadcast internationally on United States Armed Forces Radio, were a very big morale boost for us in The Jewel. 

    When the internationally known American weekly magazine, TIME, ran an article in early August of 1970 on black power radicalization in the Caribbean area, an article which featured a fiery quote from the Belize black power leader of the time, yours truly, the article boosted my ego: it made me feel that I was somebody of importance. My reaction was a youthful, immature one.

    There were two major inaccuracies in the TIME quote, and remember,

this is a famous, world-respected news magazine. TIME said that I had graduated “summa cum laude” from university, when in reality it was only “magna cum laude.” And TIME ascribed to me the inspired quote, “Tourism is whorism,” when actually the quote had been coined by the late, great Galento X Neal, a founding officer of UBAD.

    Many years went by before I matured and understood the TIME article in its proper context. The inconsistencies in that article had not been mistakes. TIME, a right wing publication, was doing a job on behalf of the Richard Nixon Republican administration, guided by Henry Kissinger, which was running the United States in 1970.

    I had been educated on a U.S. State Department scholarship granted me by a Democratic Party administration, led by Lyndon Johnson, so the fact that my scholarship had turned out wrong, so to speak, the fact that I had been radicalized between 1965 and 1968 in the States, reflected ill on the wisdom of the Democrats. This is how I eventually came to view that TIME article of August 3, 1970.

     That is a long time ago, almost 52 years in fact. In Buffalo, a city in upstate New York, a white youth went on a rampage a few days ago and slaughtered ten African Americans with an assault rifle. 

    I remembered one night when I had only been in the States for a few weeks in 1965 when I went to visit a highly-ranked women’s university called Vassar, which is in Poughkeepsie, which is also in upstate New York. I wasn’t invited to Vassar: I was desperate for a date, and remembered that one of the foreign students I’d met on my arrival in New York City was attending Vassar.

    It turned out that she had travelled to Yale University to attend a “mixer.” A girl in her dormitory got me a date to go to a movie, but it didn’t work out. Eventually, those of us who had travelled together to Vassar, all white except me, reunited and dropped in at a bar for a drink before heading back to Dartmouth. 

    A white guy who was seated at the bar turned around and saw me. He charged at me immediately. I guess he was drunk, so I was able to sidestep him. This was not taking place in Alabama or Mississippi, mind you: this was upstate New York.

    This one incident did not radicalize me. What it did was begin a trend which turned Evan Anthony Hyde into Evan X Hyde.

    In the words of Brother Pulu, peace be unto you.