Basil Keane during a Kingston and St Andrew Corporation meeting in December 1973. 'Why spend so much during Christmas then complain next year that you are suffering?' he asked during the meeting as he urged Jamaicans to resist the urge to splurge at Christmas. (Photo: Charles Kinkead/Jamaica Daily News)

LAST Saturday morning found me at the Villa Ronai launch of Douglas R Manley's new book The Candidate (LMH Publishers).

The book is dedicated, among others, To Basil who dreamed the dream. That would be the late Dr Horace James Basil Keane (1926-1993). About the others, Rachel Manley and Wayne Brown, Dr Manley was kind. Of Basil, he said 'He's dead, and there's nothing we can do about that'.

While the rest of the very august audience laughed at this bit of caustic humour I sat there slack-jawed. In shock. Close to tears. I thought it a callous way to treat the memory of one unforgettable Jamaican and a source of inspiration for his book.

'Don't be so sensitive,' was my mother's counsel. 'That's just how he is.' But sensitive I am, and apparently a little masochistic too, for at the end of Dr Manley's discourse on the book I set myself up for a little more pain in begging for a kinder word about Basil. He pointed at the dedication, 'What more do you want?' he asked.

Well, sir, some information about the man, for starters.

Basil Keane was an outstanding Calabar alumnus. He was captain of the football team (the only year it won Manning Cup) and the cricket team and the school's boxing champion. He was a Lieutenant Commander in the US Navy, one of the first five black men to be commissioned so. He studied, and instructed, at Howard University's Dental Faculty and was the first in the Caribbean and outside of the United States to receive their service award.

He was a Jamaica Labour Party councillor (1969-1974) in the Greenwich Town division. 'The most frustrating and non-productive exercise I have ever encountered and experienced,' he said. He moved resolutions against the pollution of Kingston Harbour, and dental quackery, and for the fluoridation of piped water, family planning, castration of rapists, a second television station, casino gambling, a ban on cigarette ads and the inclusion of a health warning on the packets. His decision not to stand in further elections was based on his perceived failure to prove achievement to his constituents.

He was a dental surgeon who offered his services for free to those who couldn't pay, and was too generous a gentleman to pursue those who wouldn't. He was the president of the Jamaica Dental Association and advisor on dentistry to the Ministry of Health for both the Labour Party and the People's National Party. He received the Order of Distinction (1978) and the Prime Minister's National Medal (1983) for services to dentistry and to the community.

He was loud. Once he started drinking, 'having a taste' as he called it, he got real loud. This behaviour was shamefully immortalised in V S Naipaul's book The Middle Passage after the (hyper-civilised) author witnessed Basil at a party in Trafalgar Park in the throes of a furious argument with his very dear friend, Karl Parboosingh.

Basil Keane was an actor. He played the Colonel in Dickie Jobson's 1982 film, Country Man and the Preacher in Perry Henzell's 1973 cult classic The Harder They Come. Basil thought himself a star. Henzell, in an interview said "I was supposed to shoot with him the first day, but he didn't turn up. I sent for him, and they said, 'He's asleep.' So I said, 'Well, wake him up.' An hour later he still hadn't appeared, so I sent for him again: 'He's in the bath.' I said, 'Well, why didn't someone get him out of the bath?' They said, 'He's asleep in the bath!' So at two in the morning, I'm fast asleep and I hear this horn honking outside. I go out on the verandah, and there's Basil, drunk, arms wide open, spinning around and saying, 'You ready baby? I'm ready, I'm ready.'"

He was outrageous. His Christmas morning egg nog parties, which went on for days on end, were legendary. You knew the party was finally over when Frank Sinatra started playing on the high fi at 4:00 am.

He loved art and even tried his hand at painting. He collected Pottinger and Wilson and Cadien long before they became must haves. Karl Parboosingh and Aubrey Williams stayed and painted murals in his home. Nice cats, as he called his friends, were Calvin Lockhart and George C Scott and Andrew Young and Frank Phipps and Harry Belafonte and Andrew Salkey and Rex Nettleford and Dr Martin Luther King. People he didn't like were thugs.

And they probably didn't like him either. You did or you didn't. There was no half stepping with Basil. He often accused that: 'Everybody wants to go to heaven. But nobody wants to die.' He certainly wasn't ready for death. His was as intense as his life. Early one morning while listening to cricket, his throat started closing as a reaction to medication he was taking. He suffocated in the emergency room at the University Hospital.

At his funeral, Prime Minister Patterson read a lesson, as did the Rt Hon Hugh Shearer. And a mad man came into the East Queen Street Baptist Church, looked into the casket and sadly shook his head. Basil had probably touched his life too.

Congratulations on your book, Mr Manley. I look forward to reading the yarn about grass-roots politics as you and Basil experienced and discussed. But if I may, I'd like to suggest a subject for your next work. A book on the life and times of uncle Basil would be a great read.

Trousers in Denim

Cream of the 'Crop'

Cheeky's World