Today he seems thinner, with a lean and hungry look. And Wayne Hayde, known in the calypso world as The Watchman for his trenchant social and political commentaries, is more certain than ever of the importance of his calling.

"We need to keep people in check; you can't allow them to have the power to run roughshod over people or censor them," he says. "It's important we maintain our way of dealing with people in power before they go overboard. Specifically, I'm thinking about calypso, which must continue what it's doing."

Hayde's calypsoes have been as controversial as any. Recall "Attack with Full Force" in 1991. But he also manages to spike the astringency with humour, one of his better examples being his 1996 "Mr. Panday Needs Glasses".

For the past nine months, however, Hayde has been working in Rwanda as a Witness Support Officer for the UN War Crimes Tribunal. Approximately 800,000 Tutsis were slaughtered there in three months in 1994 and the UN Security Council set up an ad hoc tribunal to investigate and prosecute those guilty of genocide. Hayde's job is to give support and protection to the witnesses for the prosecution.

He saw the horrible after effects of ethnic conflict gone crazy between the tribes of Tutsis and the Hutus. "I've been to genocide sites where you see hundreds of skulls, you see body parts blown away," he said. "I was struck by two skulls on a table, I know they were women because they were wearing scarves and there was still hair on the dry skull. They had got their heads cut off."

Hayde explained that there were no cultural differences between the Tutsis and the Hutus, no slang or folksong or dish. "The differences were economic: the Hutus were mainly cultivators whereas the Tutsis were the entrepreneurs, the more educated class," he said, "Then the Belgian colonials played one group against the other and introduced ID cards which identified your tribe."

Being a small, tightly knit society, people were able to point out who was Tutsi and who was Hutu, because they knew their individual genealogies. And if there was any doubt, there was always the ID card. "They assumed if you didn't have your ID then you were a Tutsi," said Hayde. "You know how many Hutus were killed by Hutus?"

The experience has convinced him of the value of the mechanisms societies have for managing conflict. "That's what went wrong in Rwanda, that mechanism broke down and people reverted to We versus Them," Hayde reasons, citing calypso as one of our most effective mechanisms for keeping the powerful in check.

"When I listen to what Chalkie was doing 25 years ago, it was revolutionary, there were people, who felt he should be jailed," he said. "Now, the society has changed and the words you couldn't use then you could use now, you could call a man a jackass - so you can't just say it's crude or disrespectful because it wouldn't be said 25 years ago. The art form is changing, evolving."

He admits he's on occasion been too harsh, but that's for the people to decide, not any political party because politicians are always uneasy with calypso.

"Of course you also need laws, because the informal mechanisms may not always work, so I'm in favour of anti-discrimination laws and equal opportunity laws - laws which protect rights generally rather than protecting individual groups."

He should have a special interest here, because he has recently won his anti-discrimination case in the courts here, when it was held that the Police Service Commission had treated him unfairly by ignoring his attempts at seeking promotion.

In another way Hayde's Rwanda experience, which will continue until June, has reinforced his beliefs. Several years ago he sang that until we transcended our ideas of Indian and African ancestral origins, and concentrated on our Caribbean present, "We ent arrive as yet."

"When I went to Africa, I called myself an African, I treat African as a race, but there they don't consider you African if you're not born there," he said. Likewise, he pointed out that similarly Pakistanis, Bangladeshi and Nepalese were not "East Indians". And he related an incident that took place as he drove in Tanzania with an African Muslim.

The radio was on and an Indian tune came over that reminded Hayde of the "Melodies from India" programme. "This is a good song," said the African man who turned up the volume and unself-consciously began to sing along. Hayde thought, "We in Trinidad have such a divide that many people would change the station. I wonder if our people should be trying to take us back to a motherland as opposed to creating a culture that is distinctly ours."

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