As a young man, I made one big miscalculation. I thought that when brown people in Belize found out the truth about Mama Africa, its glorious history and awe-inspiring civilizations, they would begin to move towards an embrace of their African heritage. It really didn’t work out that way. I suppose it was presumptuous of me to believe that a few years of the truth could wipe out centuries of white supremacist propaganda.
Growing up in British Honduras in the 1950’s, I was a typical brown youth in that life was easier for me than for my black brethren deeper in the ghetto. The former UBAD vice-president, Bert “Shaft” Franklin, made it his business this summer to let me know that his youth was significantly harder than mine. I don’t know if I was supposed to feel guilty, or inadequate, or whatever.
But, being a brown boy in Belize was no bed of roses. In my case, as the oldest of nine children, I had to become my mother’s right hand. I was babysitter for the younger children when she had to step out for any reason, and I received serious physical discipline when I transgressed.
I remember one time when I was 8 or 9 years old, I ran away with two of the older neighbours – Nettie and Cordel Leslie. We paddled up the Haulover Creek in a dory, and then entered Collet Canal about where the fish market is presently. There was a hole in the mangrove you had to duck through while hauling the dory, and after a while you ended up at Prisoner Creek – which was around where the lodge hall and so on are in the Vernon, Sibun, Banak Street areas. Prisoner Creek was a large body of fresh, clear, water. The swimming was great.
On my return home, I was badly beaten by my mother. Now that I am an adult, I understand completely. What would she have thought when I disappeared that morning without a trace? In fact, although I was a swimmer, I got hit in the head with a bamboo on that Prisoner Creek expedition. That could have been disastrous.
From I was a young boy, I had to go to the Belize Central Market most weekday mornings to buy various foodstuffs. The hardest transaction was always in the butcher’s section of the market, which was the market’s centerpiece, both physically and socially. The butchers were black men, and they were all “made” men, which is to say, they were sure of themselves and they were hard-nosed. It took me no time at all to realize that, little brown boy that I was, they saw me as a sucker.
The butcher’s game in the meat section was always pushing as much bone in your pound of meat as they could get away with. If you got loaded with too much bone, you would have to face your mother’s frustration when you got home. That hurt. After a while, I realized that there was one butcher, and he was brownish incidentally, who would give me a reasonable deal. I believe his name was Ernest Cattouse.
For his part, Prime Minister Dean Barrow did not have to put up with this stress as a child, because his father, Arthur “Artie” Barrow, was a man who went to the market and reasoned with the butchers for a good deal. My dad, C. B. Hyde, was and is a pure intellectual. I suppose he had found some reason not to go to the market, and good old first born had to take the load. I believe my dad would have been frustrated with the games being played in the meat section. As I said, he is a pure intellectual, for whom books are heaven on earth. Mr. Artie, on the other hand, was an applied intellectual, so to speak. He used his brains to get the best deals.
When I became an adult and became involved with UBAD, I met an older brother, Galento X Neal, whose father had been a butcher. I listened to Galento’s versions of life as a butcher’s son, and I learned a lot of things.
I would say that, as a Belizean who was fortunate enough to go as far as university and thereby avoid hard labour, my revolutionary enlightenment as a young adult involved the acquired appreciation of the role of those who “do work,” like butchers. More than that, indeed, I grew to believe that the meat section of the market was the single most important location in the capital city where the culture and socializing of roots black people were concerned. There was energy in the butcher’s section, there was pride there, and there were real men there.
In closing this discussion, I must mention that, as my mother’s right hand in my childhood days, I also had to go to stores like Rita’s on Albert Street, and “match” threads, buttons and zippers with the color of whichever cloth my mother was using to sew a dress, and I then had to deliver the dresses to customers and collect their $3.50 or so. These customers included the Vernon ladies on George Street and the late Miss Hazel Anderson on West Street, near Bishop. And, of course, I had to go to the grocery shops.
Still, the original question remains, and it is why the other brown Belizeans remained so complacent even after the truth of Africa emerged. The easy answer is privilege, those benefits which came to them as members of the class used as a buffer by the British. Myself, I reject white supremacy in all its forms and manifestations. In one of these manifestations, white supremacy uses brown people against black people. I reject that. I rejected that forty years ago, and I reject it today.
Power to the people. Power in the struggle.