Tim Hector

Antigua's unparochial political voice

Leonard Hector (Tim Hector), journalist and politician: born St John's, Antigua 24 November 1942; twice married (three sons); died St John's 12 November 2002

Tim Hector was a Antiguan firebrand – the friendliest and most human of firebrands, as anyone who called on him in his charming but disordered house on the outskirts of St John's always found out.

Born in 1942 in the then crown colony of Antigua and Barbuda, he rose, after a period of study in Canada, to find a place among the great political voices in the post-colonial West Indies. He stood alongside C.L.R. James, the Trinidadian mentor with whom he shared a passion for cricket, Walter Rodney and Cheddi Jagan of Guyana, Rosie Douglas of Dominica and Maurice Bishop of Grenada. He formed part of the radical generation which shook those often corrupt trade-union leaders who in the 1960s and 1970s succeeded to the power in the Caribbean which Britain was laying down.

Hector was never very successful in achieving elected office in an island where successive members of the Bird dynasty have dominated from independence in 1981 to the present day. He made his mark rather as a political thinker and journalist. His weapon was his fertile brain, the Antigua Caribbean Liberation Movement which he helped to establish, and his newspaper, Outlet, co-founded in 1968. This mercilessly criticised Antigua's over-dependence on tourism and its neglect of agriculture. It also revealed goverment corruption, notably the channelling of US weapons to Saddam Hussein and the apartheid regime in South Africa and the dispatch of Israeli arms to the drug barons of Colombia. His attitude brought on him recurring prison sentences and the sabotage of his publication by the authorities.

His politics brought him close to Fidel Castro. He was also behind a successful mission to Libya by the prime ministers and ministers of the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States last year, which netted the region some £14m of aid from Colonel Muammar Gaddaffi. At the end of his life he made his peace with the Bird clan and was appointed a Senator by the government.

Hector was totally without the parochialism which sometimes affected West Indian thinkers: his vision was worldwide. In January this year his Outlet column, "Fan the Flame", contained hard but prescient words about US reaction to the destruction of the World Trade Centre:

One layer of the population after another is demonised, first Arabs, then Muslims, then immigrants, then radicals, then students, then anarchists, and on and on at home, while abroad it wreaks similar havoc. After Afghanistan who's next? Iraq? Or whoever or whatever, but someone is next.

Hugh O'Shaughnessy