Unearthing the memoir of an intrepid journalist

On the eve of the 33rd remembrance of the attempted coup, I know the late Raoul Pantin would want to be remembered not as a broken man suffering from PTSD as a hostage of insurgents, but as a warrior. When I reached out to Mandisa Pantin, daughter of the late great journalist, editor, playwright and poet Raoul Pantin for permission to use an extract from Days of Wrath, his detailed account of the attempted coup in 1990, I did not expect her to say she had a greater treasure—his unpublished memoirs, and a book of poems illustrated with her paintings.

Here are some extracts of a man whose writing reveals what he loved— Trinidad, journalism, literature, democracy, world politics—a man who was always placing our new world islands in the context of the world and, by doing so, refusing to let our small islands define our big sense of possibility, refusing to let our past wounds from allowing us all to be warriors.  Excerpts from Raoul Pantin’s unpublished memoir completed around the time of his death in 2015:

“Michael X became Abdul Malik, a radical Black Muslim, who once described himself as ‘the most famous black man in the world’. “In this new persona, he returned to Trinidad in the early 1970s to rent a large house on spacious grounds on the outskirts of Arima, an eastern Trinidad district, with his wife, Desiree, and children. “It was there that I would first interview Abdul Malik who, during another encounter at his Arima residence, would introduce me to a very famous visiting couple and then friends of his— John Lennon, of the famous Beatles, and his Japanese wife, Yoko Ono. “John Lennon, who didn’t have much to say in an interview I did with him that morning, struck me as a pale and emaciated young man who looked as though he could do with some good Trinidad sunshine and food. “His equally non-verbose wife, Yoko Ono, sat quietly by his side during this interview. “That same morning, I witnessed Lennon write a cheque, no doubt for a substantial sum of money, and hand it to Malik, a contribution, I assumed, to Malik’s cause, whatever that might be.

“At that Malik household, I was also to meet one of his London sidekicks, Steve Yeates, who would drown mysteriously a few weeks later while on a seaside excursion with Malik and his family. “Unknown to me at the time, it was Steve Yeates who had delivered the fatal cutlass chop to the neck of Gale Ann Benson, another London visitor who had come to Trinidad in the company of an American Black Muslim by the name of Hakim Jamal and who had grown friendly with Malik while in Trinidad. “Following Benson’s gory murder, she was buried in Malik’s backyard where another young man, Joseph Skerrit, formerly from Belmont, also murdered by Malik, lay buried. “A few days after Benson’s murder, then unknown to me or the police, Malik contacted me to suggest I do another interview with him. I had no problem with this. Malik was a famous man and, therefore, newsworthy.

“I certainly didn’t know he was a coldblooded murderer who had already planted two bodies in his backyard. “He came to meet me in style at the Trinidad Express, where I was then employed, in a large chauffeur-driven car and drove me to the Pelican Inn on the outskirts of Port-of-Spain. “Sitting out on the balcony upstairs that Inn—and climbing the stairs Malik had observed how dirty the flooring was and said he if was running the place, he wouldn’t tolerate that—I asked Malik if he had something specific he wanted to say in this interview. He smiled and said, no. “In fact, he thought I was such a good journalist that I could make up whatever questions I liked and also fill in the answers on my own since I knew him so well.

“When I said I couldn’t do this, that it was against the ethics of my profession, he shrugged and said: “How do you think I became famous in England if I couldn’t get English journalists to do things like that for me?” On that last encounter, Malik was accompanied by a couple young men who had also participated in Benson’s and Skerrit’s murders. “Subsequently, I would always shudder with revulsion when I thought of myself sitting comfortably upstairs at the Pelican Inn in the company of three murderers. “Steve Yeates’ drowning was followed a few days later by a mysterious fire that consumed the house where Malik lived with his family. Again he telephoned me to voice great distress at these developments, but my own suspicions were aroused by then. “First, Steve Yeates drowns, and now your house burns down. What’s going on, Michael?” I could never bring myself to use any of his assumed names. “He said he was as puzzled as I was by these developments but suddenly took off for Guyana just before the police, searching the grounds of that Arima residence, had discovered the buried bodies of both Gale Ann Benson and Joseph Skerrit. 

“Malik would eventually be apprehended by the police, asleep in a Guyanese man’s camp deep in the Guyana interior. He was reportedly trying to make his way to Brazil. He would be flown back to Trinidad in handcuffs, tried, found guilty of murder, sentenced to death, and hanged. “On the day he was to be executed, I got a call from the London Evening Standard, for which I had filed the occasional story from Trinidad, asking me to follow up and file a story on Malik’s demise. “A prisons officer told me that Malik had gone meekly to the gallows, “his body stiffened as though in a trance.”

This was the story I later filed for the “Evening Standard”.”—End of excerpt