I had become notorious, at home and abroad, as a radical and anti-police element. In the village where I grew up, some older people made special prayers to return me to more respectable pursuits. Others, though, more secretly advised, "Defend yuh people, eh, garcon? Is time!"

January 1, 1969 marked my arrival -- a 26-yearold Black visitor with Scottish first name and Irish surname at Toronto's International airport -- now Lester Pearson's.

My history summed up before this hopeful date was that I, a greatgrand-off-spring of enslaved Africans, had been born in a French-named village, Morvant-Laventille; on a Spanish-named Island, Trinidad; under the political culture of Rule Brittania; and the Rum 'n' Coca-Cola influence of the Yankee dollar, oh!

My personal circumstances of birth and upbringing were indicative, too, of the general history of the various peoples of this many-conquered, multi-colonized region. The Caribbean Basin has remained a strategic crossroads in a region whose internal social and economic maldevelopment has for centuries reflected external vagaries of European or North American imperial bullies.

In fact, nothing so well defines the rule of these imperial powers as the universal and chronic failure of their policies: from 18th-century European mercantilism and U.S. Gunboat Diplomacy to 20th-century Fascism, and benign impositions of Puerto Rican models of economic development.

Like my childhood counterparts I had, for example, been schooled in what is currently touted in Tory Ontario as the basics. Schooled in Grammar, Syntax and Etymology; I could recite the rules of the verb, To Be; do Spanish and Latin verb declensions in high school -- as long as my parents paid the monthly school fees.

During these schooling years, I had been exposed not to the nearby and urgent geography of the Caribbean, but to a Colonially imposed curricula that emphasized the Australian outback and the Canadian Great Lakes system.

I had also not read Caribbean- or African-based literature, but during the week days, studied and memorized portions of English poets. On weekends, when we could avoid church, we paid tuppence hap pny for popular American cowboy movies.

Schooling and training -- as opposed to education and learning -- generally prepared us with skills, useless in solving, for example, the agricultural problems of our nation-state. We were well prepared, however, to be civil servants, useful for tallying low-cost, raw exports leaving the colony, and high-priced manufactured imports arriving. We were trained, in other words, to export employment and import inflation!

My arrival in Canada, inadvertently pursuing these jobs, occurred as part of the most massive brain-drain from the region, ironically within the same decade that region, as well as our twin-island nation, Trinidad & Tobago, was given flag -- if not economic -- independence from Great Britain.

With independence and a world calling me away, I was obliged to leave aging parents, numerous siblings, and a newly-independent yet impoverished country. Like so many other Caribbean nationals, I left home, seeking in foreign lands better opportunities for education, jobs and a more secure future.

This future in Canada would bring unimagined changes in my life, living and sensibilities. Among other changes I would come to see White people as being real humans, not the cardboard cutouts of Hollywood. I remember, my mother-in-law, Muma, visiting us years later, going on a trip to the Royal Ontario Museum, and unable to swallow her meal, a handkerchief held over her mouth, shocked at being served by a white waitress.

However, the institution that has first and most affected me, was the police. March, 1969, marked my first encounter with this force.

Encounter with Police on the Bloor Line

I had boarded a subway at Sherbourne Station in downtown Toronto on the east-west Bloor line. …