Biography

Name: Evan X Hyde
Current Home: Belize City, BZ
Occupation: Newspaper publisher

Evan X Hyde - born Evan Anthony Hyde on April 30, 1947 - is the publisher and sole proprietor of the Amandala, Belize’s most widely circulated newspaper, and the chairman of Kremandala, a multimedia conglomerate in Belize City.

As a creative writer, Hyde deems 1969 to 1975 as his most dynamic years, during which he penned exceptional stories, plays, essays, and poetry. Since then, his work has been focused on journalism. While he writes the From the Publisher and sometimes the Editorial columns in the newspaper, X Hyde has long had the ambition to publish more extensive works. His first such piece was X Communications, and now he presents his second extended work - Sports, sin and subversion.

This book is a bio in itself, as throughout its pages Hyde reveals himself to be a revolutionary thinker, always trying to reconcile the past with the present in such a way that people of today, and especially young people, can see the bigger picture. Sports is the avenue he uses in this book to open up consciousness of greater social issues.

Growing up in urban Belize, Evan X Hyde emerges out of a stable, middle class family of Belize City, and through the Catholic education system. He is the eldest of nine children born to Charles Bartlett Hyde, former Postmaster General and former Speaker of the House, and Elinor Belisle Hyde, seamstress and homemaker.

Notwithstanding this background, his thinking is best described as non-conformist. X Hyde’s transformation was sparked by his experiences of the 1960’s, at the time when the Black Power movement was peaking in the United States. His experiences between 1965 and 1968, as a student at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, U.S.A., utterly revolutionized the way he saw himself and the world, and it deepened the scope of his insights into social and political issues, and the plight of his own people.

Evan Hyde graduated from that U.S. university, Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude. Returning home from Dartmouth College in 1968 with a Bachelor’s degree in English, Hyde wasn’t looking for a routine job behind a desk. He followed the more arduous path of becoming a radical leader and civic activist at the young age of 21.

He was one of the founding members of the United Black Association for Development (UBAD). He served as president in 1969 – the year he dropped his middle name and began using an X, symbolizing his respect and honor for his African ancestors whose names were erased during the course of slavery.

The Amandala newspaper was first published in August of that same year, as a propaganda organ of UBAD, and it has continued to exist on the same fundamental principles of social justice for people of color which were promulgated by UBAD four decades ago.

Hyde’s candid and outspoken manner of expressing himself, his high energy and revolutionary mindset, meant that he quickly ran afoul of “the establishment.” It was not uncommon for the powers that be, to target activists for jail time, and so it was that Hyde along with another UBAD founder, Ismail Omar Shabazz, was accused of seditious conspiracy for a newspaper article – a charge of which they were later acquitted.

Even while Evan X Hyde has continued to be a black power activist, he became actively involved in sports at the organizational level, having been the backbone behind football and basketball teams in Belize City and Dangriga. These efforts have been guided by a broader mission to drown the despair of his people with the high esteem and euphoria that accompany the competitive games of sports.

Realizing the risks young Belizean men would eventually face of falling into a life of gang and criminal activities, he invested a lot of his time, energy and money on developing sports in Belize, with the aim of providing a positive outlet for young Belizean men. Grigamandala, Warriors and Raiders are testimonies of these efforts.

In this publication, it will be clear to the reader that Hyde’s initiatives in Belizean sports were driven by a larger vision for the positive advancement of young men in Belize, but the same forces that swiftly moved to quash the Black Power movement of the 60’s have continued oppressing and suppressing the development of sports in Belize for their own selfish reasons.

As a former Senator and former politician, Hyde speaks with authority on the way in which politics, at all levels, affects people in ways they might not even be aware.

Much more of Evan X Hyde is revealed on the very pages of this book, which gives readers an insightful and captivating account of personal experiences, reflections and lessons about life and sports.

Written by Adele O. Ramos