Borrowed excerpt :
It was the West Indies' darkest day. It was also the longest. All day on Thursday March 6, 1997, family members of Jamaica's most lustrous personality gathered round the St. Andrew bedside of Michael Manley as he drifted into the penultimate hours of his final struggle - a mortal combat between his clear, incisive mind and the insurgent prostate cancer that was known to have engaged him some six years earlier.
As the lengthening hours closed in on midnight, with some 15 minutes left before the new day, the struggle ended and Jamaica's most persuasive voice was stilled. With his family and close friends around his bedside, Michael Manley, 72, journalist, trade unionist, politician, author, prime minister, horticulturalist, lecturer, Third World leader, anti-apartheid fighter, sports enthusiast, cricket writer, and a towering beacon of hope and enthusiasm for millions of his countrymen at home and abroad, lay dead.
It was a remarkable day for it had also begun with death. Before the day was 30 minutes old, the President of Guyana, Cheddi Jagan, 78, son of indentured labourers from India, had been pronounced dead in a U.S. hospital from a heart attack. To further mystify matters, that dark Thursday was the first day of the first cricket test match between the West Indies and India who were opening their 1997 tour at Sabina Park in Kingston.
The West Indies team then was made up almost entirely of players of African descent and so it was something of a struggle between Africa and India – the old world, in the new.
But with India scoring
300 runs for the loss of only two wickets at the close of the first day's play, Manley, the cricket writer, on his deathbed in St. Andrew would have felt that, against India, a team that had traditionally been suspect to hostile pace bowling, the West Indies pace bowlers had failed to regain their once-feared dominance.
Was there anything left to live for?
