When it was officially announced last week that Vere Cornwall Bird of Antigua & Barbuda was in his last days, the thought came to mind that he dominated and perhaps still dominates the poliscape of Antigua and Barbuda like cathedrals dominate the landscape, or the Hapsburgs in Austria, or Queen Victoria in the English Victorian age.

V.C. Bird dwarfed into insignificance such as R.S.D. Goodwin the first of the 20th century planter-caudillos, whose word was law and, who exercised virtual monopoly control over life and living in this 170 square mile, twin-island state. V.C. Bird diminished the historical importance of Henckell Dubisson, - so much so the name is relatively unknown here - real owner of the sole sugar factory here for decades established in 1904 and continuing until 1967 under their family control. When Dubisson paid his periodic visits from London to Antigua even the mighty planters trembled. In the age of V.C. Bird he became an historical cipher.

V.C. Bird reduced to diminuendo such as Sir Alexander Moody Stuart who for some 25 years ruled the roost in Antigua controlling some 33,000 acres of land, and the sole sugar refinery in the last fretful years of King Sugar, with much of the commercial sector, including Pan American Airways, under his thumb.

V.C. Bird followed, then fought, then flushed from history the most impressive Black man in the social and political history of Antigua & Barbuda, before V.C. Bird himself assumed his mantle.

This man whom V.C. Bird replaced was the man who helped to found the first Workingmen's Association here; the first black man to be styled First Elected Member in the legislature, and who in the highest councils spoke with passion, amidst the scoffing of the planters, on behalf of the people of Antigua & Barbuda; the man who led the first Trade Union; the man who on March 6, 1939, at the head of the Antigua Trades and Labour Union, led the first Trade Union strike; the man who as President of the AT&LU in 1939 secured the first general increase in wages, in 56 years on the plantations of pancake flat, plantation Antigua. This was the man who sought and secured the abolition of the humiliation of whipping on sugar estates, a widespread practice as old as chattel slavery in these parts. This was the same man who in 1941, secured the reduction of the working day from 12 to 8 hours; the first man who saw to the upgrading of women's wages as field and domestic workers.

This man was back then, before V.C., known as 'Moses the Deliverer'. That man, was Reginald St Clair Stevens, who virtually sacrificed his entire wealth, made as a jeweller, to the cause of the struggles of the working people. He was to die heart-broken. Hounded by a pack of specious lies and base calumnies instigated and mouthed by V.C. Bird, who succeeded him in 1945 as President of the sole trade union, and as First Elected Member in the Legislature. The rise of the latter was meteoric. But the means did not justify the end, or the end the means. It was to leave an abominable tradition, that leaders in Antigua are only removed in the pits of disgrace, the surer, if concocted. Even V.C. Bird himself ere his political end, was to be the target of two failed palace coups engineered by of all person - his very own son.

V.C. Bird would say only that in his course removal of Reggie Stevens he did what he had to do. That makes sense in a world and in a context where all values had been blitzed in the Second World War. V.C. Bird himself was to bow out of politics in the pits of the Carla Samuel scandal, a scandal in which he was implicated in both design and execution as well as beneficiary. In that sense, the end did not forget the beginning. He came by scandal false, and went by scandal true.

Nevertheless, V.C. Bird a man born poor, in the first decade of the twentieth century, when conditions had changed little since the abolition of slavery, had risen from the Boys School, through the Salvation Army and the Antigua Trades and Labour Union, to become the last of Antigua's First Elected Members, holding that position from 1945 to 1960 in the colonial administration; then first and only chief Minister from 1960-1967; then Antigua's first and last Premier, 1967-71, then again from 1976-1981; finally, Antigua's first Prime Minister 1981-1994. This makes V.C. Bird not only the longest shadow in Antigua & Barbuda's history, but the tallest of the tall elms.

V.C. had no great schools, secondary or tertiary, behind him or under him, no famous Inns of Court, little or no connection with international organisations of note. He was, so to speak, entirely home-grown. Product of the colonial plantation model in and of itself. A model which provided little scope for the development of the human personality, and even less by way of social mobility.

V.C. Bird's rise from nothing to everything, is not just a story of rags to riches. In his person, or political persona is contained much of the history of Antigua and Barbuda, at once social and political. The best and the worst meet in him and contend on Antigua and Barbuda's historical stage. All the contradictions of our history, meet and contend, mostly unresolved, in V.C Bird's being.

And when it was officially announced that Sir V.C. Bird's end was at hand, my mind flashed back to a poem which Vere Cornwall Bird himself would have learnt by heart in his youth, the well-known Elegy by Thomas Gray, which was obligatory in every school child's colonial education in these parts. (Incidentally, poems extolling freedom were never the subject of instruction or comprehension in V.C. Bird's youth, or now. Such was and still is anathema. Why so?)

Anyway, here are the two verses of Gray's poem that came to mind:

In his lifetime V.C. Bird had his "animated bust" installed, airport and street were named in his honour, and flatteries unlimited were heaped upon him. The highest national honour and the first Knighthood have all been bestowed, including a special cemetery for his burial. Little or nothing is left to come posthumously.

Indeed, all it was necessary to do to get elected on V.C. Bird's coat-tails was to say at a mass public meeting "Under the leadership of the great V.C. Bird" and one's selection, election, and re-election was assured, if not doubly assured. Featherweights emerged however large in physical size.

And now, they say the "inevitable hour" was at hand, the "pomp of power" past, likewise 'the boast of heraldry." On his passing flatteries will roll out in syllable and multi-syllable, and descriptive phrases will flow verbosely off the tongue, attesting as to his greatness, leaving the dictionary wanting. And none will tell, according to Gray, what "froze the genial current of his soul." But, maybe, only V.C. Bird knows or knew.

But, what was, in my opinion, V.C. Bird's finest hour. Was it when he sat in the grey and maroon Vauxhall donated to him by the Union, and the adoring masses, in 1952 who refused to let him drive it. But, instead, pushed it themselves, each jostling for a place among the many to push, celebrating his leadership during the 1951 struggle? 1951, a six month strike, the most intense struggle waged in this island since King Court, Tomboy & Hercules led a cultural revolution here in 1734, 1735 & 1736. Over those years, led by King Court the slaves resurrected and modified African customs and ways of being in opposition to colonial impositions. And, the white slave-owners in an orgy of terror executed them by hanging; Proclaiming that they intended an insurrection.

Now the heirs of King Court, after 50 years of V.C. Bird's leadership have become devout partisans of hanging, as a means of final or capital punishment. The bloody colonial and barbaric instruction taught by the coloniser have been incorporated into the being of the colonised. The most gruesome episode in our history, in 1736, following King Court's cultural revolution, "to make ourselves masters of the island" which, they say, was a bloody revolution planned for October 11, 1736. The slaves did nothing. Burnt nothing. Stoned no one. Shot nobody. Yet by January 15, 1737, sixty nine were executed. Five were broken on the wheel. Six were starved to death, their heads then cut off and fixed on poles and their bodies burnt. Nothing could be more barbaric. Except that the remaining 58 were chained to stakes and their bodies burnt. It was unspeakable brutality and cruelty. Their accusers, felt that theirs was a capital offence - treason.

We today, after 50 years of V.C. Bird's leadership, have adopted the cruel and unusual punishment, in our adoption of the ways of our oppressors. Their cruelties we hold to be civilisation. And seeking to be "civilised" "like them," we adopt their pre-Christian idea of an eye-for-an-eye as our own, even when they have abandoned it, we now claim it as our 'culture'.. No wonder we are both eyeless and toothless. Blind to more human values. Tasteless of better standards. We have tarried too long in the wilderness of dispossession.

But I divert myself with this assault on capital punishment. What was V.C. Bird's most memorable hour?

Was it at Statehood in Association when in 1967 he returned home from London with Antigua and Barbuda's first written Constitution. The mass of people were overjoyed and much pleased with V.C. Bird. Though Britain had only invented a new name for a colony - Statehood in Association. We thought we were free. Our anthem for the occasion celebrated freedom. We are forever oblivious of the contradictions in our history. And so resolve nothing. But that is not my point here.

What was V.C. Bird's finest hour? The answer necessarily has to be subjective, but made historically objective. Was it the Industrial Development Act of 1952 under which V.C. Bird, as Chairman of the Industrial Development Board set up a Cornmeal factory, an edible oil factory and an Arrowroot factory. All of these collapsed in bankruptcy in ten short years. V.C. Bird's early attempt at import-substitution industrialisation collapsed like a house of sand before the wind. So, that could not be his finest hour.

Typically V.C. abandoned this project of industrialisation by import-substitution, never to return to it. His party never studied it to arrive at another take-off. The Party he led studied nothing. It's Executive meetings confined itself to inane subjects and issues of democratisation and decolonisation, or industrialisation, economic integration never got on the agenda in any way serious way. It was part of the anti-intellectualism which is redolent not only in V.C.'s party, but all West Indian political parties. Their business is winning elections, maintaining power, not ideas. And, definitely not the study of critical development issues. What passes for issues are merely means to attack the other party, the better to win the next election.

V.C. Bird has passed into history as a Federalist for his role in initiating CARIFTA with Burnham and Barrow. But the truth is, having attended the Montego Bay Conference in 1947 and assenting to its Federal prescriptions, he returned to Antigua and immediately voted against the Federal resolutions of the Montego Bay Conference. When the West Indies Federation collapsed in 1962, efforts to Federate the Little 8, as substitute for the defunct West Indies Federation of 10, were finally torpedoed by the very V.C. Bird over an innocuous issue: V.C. Bird's refusal to allow the Little Eight government to have control over the Antigua and Barbuda Post Office! He was a provincialist to the max.

Was it V.C. Bird's finest hour the policy by which he gave to foreigners, prime beach-front lands at peppercorn prices, and too, with virtually unlimited tax holidays, and so saw the establishment of 32 luxury hotels, which brought to Antigua and Barbuda over 250,000 tourists annually by the end of his reign in 1994? He perhaps may have thought so. Though he himself rated his finest hour the time when he defied the Colonial government in 1962, and made then Administrator, Ian Turbott, livid with rage, as he used funds not allocated in the Budget, to expand what was then Coolidge Airport.

Or was V.C. Bird's finest hour when in 1961, John Stewart, a Methodist minister took the Freemans Village Boys Brigade to the beach at Half Moon Bay. Half Moon Bay Hotel's white guests left the beach at once, in red-faced anger, as the Black Boys Brigade bathed in the azure blue waters. The guests thought the beach was theirs, exclusively. Rev. John Stewart was asked to leave the beach with his "nigger boys". But he refused. Similar incidents occurred at Anchorage and later at CBC, now Halcyon. Tension mounted.

Then, V.C. Bird, taller than tall, in the legislature, rose to his full height and with visage stern, each word clearly enunciated in his typical slotting of each word into place, said that Antigua and Barbuda welcomes its white visitors "But, the first order they must bear in mind is respect for our people. Whoever seeks war will get war." The white colonial owners and new hoteliers and managers, stood in their boots, and not just wandered, but trembled. It was truly a grand moment. A dispossessed people had a leader, V.C. Bird, who was laying down the "first order" the possessors must bear in mind, namely "respect for our people". It was a really fine moment. Though, respect for the dispossessed, was not hard for the dispossessors to show, once they remained in possession. And, therefore, in effective control. It was nonetheless one of V.C. Bird's fine moments.

But I will not keep you in suspense any longer. In my view, V.C. Bird' finest moment, an unparalleled moment in Caribbean history, came in 1960. In 1959, even after Rosa Parks had sat down on the bus in Montgomery and refused to get up, as was the Jim Crow practice, to get up for a white man to take her seat; even after Dr Martin Luther King had led the successful boycott of the Montgomery buses' when for a whole year Black women and men refused to ride the buses, preferring to walk or use any other mode of transport; even after all that, white America still forbade Marian Anderson, the greatest living soprano, a Diva ranking with the best of all time, the opportunity to sing in the famed Carnegie Hall - whites only.

V.C. Bird was outraged by this insult to the great Marian Anderson. If they could do this to the best of us, he said what would they not do the least of us. Nor was V.C. Bird just outraged. Where others shook their heads in resigned acceptance, V.C. Bird moved to do something about "this insult to the black race."

What he did was in no way self-serving. Nor vote-catching. It was most dramatic. And, most sincerely so.

He invited Marian Anderson, as Chief Minister of Antigua and Barbuda, and on behalf of the people of Antigua and Barbuda, to sing for the people of Antigua and Barbuda.

Antigua and Barbuda, then had no Concert Hall. The British did not see such as part of their so-called "civilising" mission. V.C. Bird therefore had Marion Anderson sing for the public at large, at our very own Mecca - the Antigua Recreation Grounds, the "Pasture", the cultural centre-piece of all of our lives. All were invited. All were welcome. The Marion Anderson concert was for free.

To my teen-age mind then, this was a move on the part of V.C. Bird, whose only historical parallel was the brothers Gaius and Tiberius Gracchus, known in ancient history as the Gracchi, Tribune of the Plebs, allowing the ancient Romans to attend the best concerts for free. At any rate, this was politics on the grand scale by V.C. Bird.

There is more to it than that. I was told, and did confirm that on her arrival Marian Anderson asked V.C. Bird if she should do only spirituals, since it was a public concert, for the poor in spirit. He replied do much as you would do at Carnegie Hall. And so at the beginning of her concert Marian Anderson did pieces from La Traviata, the Marriage de Figaro and Don Giovanni among others. The public address system was bad and the night was windy, making bad matters worse. But the great Diva soldiered on. She too understood the significance, and moreso the symbolism of the occasion. And then she moved into the more familiar piece by Bach, Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring, The Lord's Prayer, and then the spirituals, and brought the house down.

In the while, and before the concert, the opposition led by Robert Hall, in the worst piece of political insensitivity, lambasted and excoriated Bird for bringing the world's greatest contralto to Antigua. It was a waste of money, they declared, up and down the land by loudspeaker loud and brash, even after the arrival of Marian Anderson. To insensitivity they had added injury. They had joined with the forces of Jim Crow, with the practitioners of segregation, with the dominant forces of racial oppression. They had missed the point. And, by more than a mile.

V.C. Bird had made a gesture at once national and international. Where in the United States the racists had denied Marian Anderson her just due, in Antigua and Barbuda, an entire people had raised its clenched fist against racism, not as atomised individuals, but as a people. The great George Padmore, still alive in Ghana cabled his congratulations, as did Amy Ashwood Garvey, as did the wife of W.E.B. Du Bois as did Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte, and more importantly, Dr Kwame Nkrumah, President of Ghana. In a word, the whole Black World, in Africa and the diaspora had taken note and applauded. V.C. Bird knew, and well knew, that he would be 'white listed' for 'un-American' activities by the powers that be. But boldly and bravely he went ahead nonetheless. He was prepared to take on any power, however great, to remedy this insult to the black race. It was politics on the grand scale.

In that single move V.C. Bird had placed himself and the people of Antigua and Barbuda in the very forefront of the battle against racial oppression. Dr Eric Williams then Premier of Trinidad & Tobago, author of the justly famous Capitalism & Slavery, would not have dared to do as V.C. Bird did. V.C. Bird had written an imperishable line in the history of humankind struggling to become truly human. High culture he had said, Mozart's operas, and the great chorales were the common property of the common people, the world over. Nothing truly human was alien to us.

I know of no other event in the history of tiny Antigua & Barbuda which had more meaning, resonance and significance than this.

And yet it passed into history, not referred to by V.C. Bird himself in his several reminiscences. Strange. The "genial current of his soul froze". He never again ventured into any similar act. Marian Anderson though, famous as she was, a-political as she had to appear to be, wore it as a badge of honour, that a whole people, the people of Antigua and Barbuda, and in particular the Chief Minister of Antigua and Barbuda, V.C. Bird, had used the power of the state, to assuage an insult to her genius, and that of African peoples everywhere. It was an act of solidarity which would set an example to far more powerful states.

However, V.C. Bird did rank as one of his greatest achievements his support for the Mau Mau. This was when he was invited to Kenya in 1955, by Britain, as part of a colonial delegation to verify that Kenyan detainees and prisoners in the nationalist war with Britain were being treated fairly. While the delegation did report favourably on prison conditions, and though V.C. Bird did not write a minority report, in his meetings with Kenyans he openly encouraged the Mau Mau, the guerrilla arm of the Kenyan struggle, in his words, "to fight and fight, to fight on and on." It was a notable gesture in the cause of African freedom.

I need hardly remind that this same V.C. Bird who had stood so grandly and so proudly against racial oppression, was to have Space Research here, sending near-nuclear weapons to racist South Africa, at the height of the anti-apartheid struggle, when two thousand and four score youth had been gunned down by the forces of apartheid, on June 16, 1976. And when on November 13, 1978, telecast, broadcast and print media throughout the world, confirmed what Outlet and ACLM had charged, namely, that sophisticated artillery, the Howitzer 126, were being sent from Antigua to racist South Africa, V.C. Bird, let it be known that "We would do it again." For him, according to Thomas Gray, "no more the blazing hearth shall burn,/ no children run to lisp their sire's return,/ Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share."

The same V.C. Bird who since 1945 had battled for Constitutional reform would himself oppose political Independence for Antigua and Barbuda, because another party, the PLM, proposed it. Indeed, the British government, through Nicholas Riddley, then the British Minister of Overseas Development in 1979, had to threaten to have Britain "declare its independence of Antigua" before son Lester Bird persuaded father V.C. Bird to accept independence. Nonetheless he was proclaimed and acclaimed the Father of the Nation. I need not catalogue the volume of his contradictions in full.

Maybe as Thomas Gray himself wrote V.C. Bird heaped honours on himself.

"The struggling pangs of conscience truth to hide, To quench the blushes of ingenuous shame, Or heap the shrine of Luxury and Pride With incense kindled at the Muse's flame.

However, it is well to note that when V.C. Bird assumed the powers of internal self-government in 1960 there was most prudent fiscal management. So much so, that V.C. Bird's primary objective as Minister of Finance, and head of government, was to end the stage where Britain had to make-up the deficit on Antigua's annual budget by providing, what was then called, grant-in-aid. A balanced Budget thus became for V.C. Bird the litmus test of a giant stride from dependence and colonial rule. That was V.C. Bird in his first coming.

In his second coming, after he had lost power in 1971 returning to it in 1976, as prudent as he was in the 60's so was his fiscal policies lax and profligate. Not just laissez-faire, but looseness became the norm. For some twelve years, 1981-1993, public accounts were not presented annually. Public finance became if not an open sewer, then certainly an open sesame. Accountability, the corner-stone of democratic government became non-existent. The end did forget the beginning. An ascetic Salvation Army Captain, became profligate and loose not just in public financing but in his public life style. He lived in open concubinage with a minor, who, in time, became a small-island version of Imelda Marcos. Swing low, sweet cadillac.

But V.C. Bird might well claim as his finest hour or it could be claimed on his behalf, that Antigua with a population of 65,000 received an aggregate of U.S. $178 million as Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) over the period 1976to 1989. This was more, over the same period, 1976-1988 than Haiti with 7 million people which received US$172 million or Barbados with four times the population of Antigua, which over the same period received US$148.6 million as FDI. Or Guyana, many many times the size of Antigua which recorded US$-31 million as its FDI over the same period of time.

St Lucia alone, of all the OECS countries outstripped Antigua in 1976-88 in terms of Foreign Direct Investment totalling US$354.2 million for the same period to Antigua & Barbuda's US$178 million as FDI. And among the MDC's only Trinidad and Tobago exceeded Antigua in terms of Foreign Direct Investment for the same period.

More to the point. With this massive inflow of Foreign Direct Investment, it was at this time that corruption ran amok. There was the arms to South Africa scandal, the airport scandal, where US$11.5 million disappeared in 8 weeks for re-surfacing the airport, a project without checks and safeguards of any kind. So that in the end Justice Nedd determined that PM V.C. Bird's eldest son, himself named after his father, and also a Minister of government "ran with hares and hunted with the hounds." He determined too that the son "had placed himself in the ideal position to feather his nest." And then followed the arms for Antigua to the Medellin drug cartel in Colombia. To be followed later by the huge cost overruns on the Italian financed and constructed Royal Antigua Resort Hotel. Italians went to jail for their part in this scandal, in Antigua & Barbuda it was business as usual.

Whatever it may have been the underlying cause and however glaringly V.C. Bird became his opposite in his "ignoble strife" (Gray again), the thought of his passing "Implores" more than "the passing tribute of a sigh" from me.

For it remains an enduring fact, unquestionable too, that when others far better endowed than V.C. Bird, with Inns of Court at their back, and great University learning to their credit, turned instead to represent the Plantocracy the better to fatten themselves, he stood alone with a close knit group of "second standard boys," on behalf of the mass of downtrodden and dispossessed, shaking their collective fist at the mighty fortress of the British Empire. It was his finest hour.