Lynden O. Pindling; Led the Bahamas to Independence

Lynden O. Pindling, who led the Bahamas to independence during his 25 years as prime minister but was turned out of office in 1992 in the face of corruption charges, died Saturday of prostate cancer. He was 70.

Radio and television stations broadcast tributes to the longtime leader, who was diagnosed with the disease four years ago. Funeral arrangements were yet to be announced.

Pindling became premier in 1967, ending more than 300 years of white rule. He led the tropical archipelago, which lies 60 miles southeast of Florida, to independence from Britain in 1973.

In his early years as prime minister, Pindling’s policies helped create a large black middle class by broadening educational opportunities for the country’s 172,000 people. He helped tourism grow and improved the Bahamas’ social and physical infrastructure.

But his administration suffered from allegations, never fully proven, of bribery and protecting drug traffickers in the 1970s and 1980s. U.S. media reports accused Pindling and other leading officials of accepting bribes from fugitive American financier Robert Vesco and Colombian drug lord Carlos Lehder to allow cocaine and marijuana to be smuggled into the United States through the Bahamas.

A government commission that investigated the charges produced evidence that, between 1977 and 1983, Pindling and his wife deposited in their bank accounts $3.5 million more than he earned as prime minister. A majority of the panel concluded, however, that “none of the known sources of funds . . . appears to have been drug related.”

The allegations clouded the country’s relations with the United States and contributed to Pindling’s election defeat in 1992 to Hubert Ingraham, Pindling’s onetime protege. Ingraham, the current prime minister, gained a second term in 1997, while Pindling’s Progressive Labor Party won just six of the 40 seats in the National Assembly.

Pindling resigned from the House of Assembly that year, acknowledging that he was “less than perfect.”

“When all I did for good is put in the balance against all I did for ill or failed to do at all, I hope that future generations will not find me sorely wanting,” he told legislators.

Despite his problematic past, Bahamians mourned the loss of the leader known as the “Black Moses.”

Pindling was born in an impoverished black section of Nassau called Over the Hill. His father, a Jamaican schoolteacher, moved to the Bahamas and worked briefly as a police officer before becoming a grocer.

After attending Nassau’s Government High School, where he was a fine student and a good athlete, Pindling studied law at the University of London, where he earned his degree in 1952.

The next year he returned to the Bahamas and helped establish the Progressive Liberal Party as grass-roots opposition to the mostly white, colonial-run United Bahamian Party. In 1956, he was elected to the House of Assembly on the PLP ticket, the first real opposition the United Bahamian Party had ever faced. He became minority leader of the six PLP candidates who won office in the election.

Pindling is survived by his wife, Marguerite; two sons, Obafemi, 40, and Leslie, 39; two daughters, Michelle Sands, 38, and Monique Johnson, 34; and five grandchildren.