The Tribune

By Larry Smith

IN print, Paul Anthony White described his roots as “deep in Grant’s Town, in the belly of Over-the-Hill, where our mother and grandmother alternately tanned our backside for going against the rules; and where, from serving around the high altar at St Agnes Church under the late Canon Milton Cooper, those rules were even more painfully emphasised and enforced”.

Born in 1940, at the age of 14 he began an informal apprenticeship in journalism and printing under the late Cyril St. John Stevenson at The Nassau Herald, then a struggling anti-establishment newspaper. In 1953, Stevenson had helped organise the Progressive Liberal Party, which three years later became the first political party to win seats in the House of Assembly.

“That was when, one might say, we received our fiery baptism in the political waters of the Bahamas, which were raging even back then as the newly-formed Progressive Liberal Party attempted to make real the impossible dream of defeating the rich and mighty Bay Street in the general elections of 1956,” White wrote in a 2012 column for the Punch.

He left the Bahamas for studies in New York, where he was married twice, and was in the audience when Malcolm X was assassinated in Harlem in 1965. He did not return to Nassau until 1968, after the PLP consolidated its tenuous hold on power in a landslide election that April.

After Education Minister Cecil Wallace Whitfield led a major rupture in the PLP in 1970, White became involved in opposition politics following the creation of the Free National Movement. During this time, he operated a communications agency (International Marketing Partners) and a short-lived political tabloid called the Friday Mail.

In 1977, he accepted a position at the Cayman Islands tourism news bureau, and also edited the Cayman Free Press, which was operated by a Briton named Brian Uzzell who had left the Bahamas after independence. In one of his Punch columns, White described this move as “self exile”, recalling the political difficulties he faced at home. In fact, it came after he and the Mail were successfully sued by then Prime Minister Lynden Pindling.

“(Cayman) was an idyllic oasis of about 9,000 souls,” he wrote appreciatively, “where the local jail consisted of 12 cells which were seldom filled, where murder was considered a faraway plague, where there were no political parties or labour unions, and where the Church was seriously the colony’s one foundation.”

In perhaps the strangest episode of his life, White was offered a communications contract in 1982 by the revolutionary government of the Republic of Seychelles in the Indian Ocean. After independence in 1976, this former British colony had become a Marxist dictatorship, but was seeking to win back the European, Asian and North American tourists it had formerly relied on.

“It was necessary,” White said, “through effective government public relations, to get across the message to those markets that Seychelles was not only a beautiful necklace of a thousand islands, but also completely safe to visit. I accepted the challenge, and took off with wife and two young daughters.”

Within weeks of his arrival there was an army mutiny, and White was briefly taken into protective custody. After the short-lived revolt collapsed, he was released, and stayed on for another two years before returning to Cayman which he considered home. But eventually he returned to the Bahamas.

According to former prime minister Hubert Ingraham, “when I joined the Free National Movement in 1990 he was at the height of his game, assisting the party in framing our message in the lead-up to the 1992 general election. He continued to provide writing services for the FNM, for me and for other members of each of the governments which I led in the years that followed. We have lost an exceptionally gifted Bahamian, a man of great intellectual curiosity, a steadfast friend, and a man of great faith.”

As White described his own career, “it has been a life chock full of a vast variety of experiences which made a difference in lives and in places. Through it all the persistent romance in (my) soul has resulted in a small aggregate of marriages, the longest and perhaps the most wonderfully enduring of which was the last. Yet there is extreme satisfaction in a life lived so meaningfully at every juncture, at every exchange with friend and foe alike.”

In more recent years, he was a regular columnist at the Punch and owner of Joy FM. An enthusiastic Rotarian, he loved debating and reminiscing with close friends like Rev. Ranfurly Brown, former high commissioner Basil O’Brien, former PLP cabinet minister George Smith and retired educator Roger Kelty.

“Anthony was my dear friend for almost 16 years and I know that I shall miss him greatly,” Kelty told me. “He spoke to me often about his unpublished book ‘Lives and Empty Glasses’.”

White lived through six marriages (twice to the same woman), which all ended in divorce. He is survived by four children – Tuesday, Earl Anthony, Adair and Caroline; nine grandchildren; and two sisters – Carolia and Jean. He died at Doctors Hospital on November 26 of complications following surgery.

• John Marquis, former Managing Editor of The Tribune, said of Mr White: “I first met Anthony in the 1960s when he returned to Nassau from university in New York. I always regarded him as one of the most gifted of Bahamian journalists.

“Up until quite recently, he would regularly email his Punch column to me to keep me up to date on developments in the Bahamas.

“He had a very distinctive writing style, and I particularly appreciated his nostalgic pieces recalling characters we both knew half a century ago. I was shocked and saddened to hear of his passing.

“Bahamian journalism has lost one of its most talented and colourful characters.”