 Sobers was met in Bridgetown by an enormous and hostile press storm. "To say there was an uproar in the Caribbean is comprehensively to understate what took place," the Jamaican politician Michael Manley later wrote in his History of West Indies Cricket. The Antigua Labour Party's Workers' Voice newspaper damned Sobers as "a white black man" and charged that by playing in Rhodesia, he had "abdicated his loyalty to Africans everywhere, and all West Indians in particular". Manley's opinion was that if Sobers did not apologise, he "may not be welcomed anywhere by people who believe that justice is bigger than even sport". Frank Walcott of the Barbados Workers' Union, who was a personal friend of Sobers, publicly called for his captaincy of the West Indies to be revoked, as did many others. Sobers told reporters at Seawell Airport that he had "never been bothered about criticism, and I do not see why I should start now". Sympathy for Sobers amid the affair came mainly from his fellow Barbadians. Vernon Jamadar, Leader of the Opposition in Trinidad and Tobago, praised Sobers' "calm dignity in response to the primitive savagery of West Indian gutter politicians".
