No research has ever been done, to the best of our knowledge, on the Belizeans who live in Great Britain. The first large migration of British Hondurans to Britain took place in World War II when the British sent for our forestry workers to help in the war effort against Germany. The British Hondurans were sent to work in the forests of Scotland, as far as we understand. (During World War II, the airplanes were not all metal. They still had timber components.) Many of these British Hondurans did not come home after the war. They married British women, so now we are talking about third and fourth generations of Belizeans who are British citizens.

gain, there were undocumented numbers of Belizean young ladies who married British soldiers, beginning in the fifties when the British had a garrison here. These Belizeans went to Britain and raised families there.

In addition there have been various students and workers who have ended up permanently resident in Britain over the last half century and more.

The last time I heard, the black population of Britain was about 4 percent. It should be relatively easy to document the numbers of Belizeans in the United Kingdom, unlike the case with Belizeans in the United States, because almost all Belizeans in Britain are legally resident there.

Whatever the amount of Belizeans in Britain in the 1960?s, their voices were disproportionately loud, and their leader was Nadia Cattouse. Nadia was high profile in London because she was a singer and actress of caliber and renown. When the British government began trying to sell out British Honduras to Guatemala, beginning with the Puerto Rico conference in 1962, a Belizean lobby in England, led by Nadia, alerted British parliamentarians to the treachery. So there were British parliamentarians taking issue with the British government about the sellout of the colony and its people.

(Odinga Lumumba was in London at the time, but he was still trying to find his legs. He had traveled to England as a teenager in 1961, before the hurricane named Hattie. After he joined the British version of the Black Panthers in the later 1960?s, Lumumba became friends with Britain?s most famous actress, Vanessa Redgrave.)

These early 1960?s require research, but research costs money. The importance of the period has to do with the fact that this was a transitional period for British Honduras, which became a self-governing colony in 1963. Once B.H. became self-governing, the United States finally began to offer foreign aid to the people of Belize. And Washington then took an open interest in the Guatemalan dispute, allowing the American Wall Street lawyer, Bethuel Webster, to ?mediate? the dispute, which was between Britain and Guatemala at the time. Webster is the one who produced the Seventeen Proposals in 1968, proposals which Philip Goldson had exposed in 1966 as the Thirteen Proposals.

It is vital for Belizeans living in the United States to study the role of Nadia Cattouse?s Belizean lobby in the United Kingdom. In this new millennium, the crucial lobby to protect Belize has to be those Belizeans living inside the United States. The ?dispute? is now between Guatemala and Belize. It is the United States which will oversee the whole process of negotiations, through Washington?s surrogate ? the Organization of American States (OAS).

The problem for a Belizean lobby in the United States is that American blacks have reason to mistrust and dislike Caribbean blacks. This is a situation I will have to analyze some other time. The American blacks who are in Congress know little about Belize and care even less. But in order to resist the aggression of a hostile neighbour who is 50 times bigger than us, Belizeans will need the support of American black leaders, and it is those Belizeans in the United States who have to make contact with the so-called Black Caucus.

The present immigration uproar in the United States involves attempts by the U.S. Congress to make illegal immigration into the United States become a felony instead of a misdemeanour. First indications are that black American leaders are supporting the new law, but such a law would, of course, be extremely hostile to Caribbean (read ?Belizean?) blacks.

Black people need to get regional. The forces of white supremacy have been organized and ?networked? for a long time. In this age of modern telecommunications, ignorance no longer can be an excuse for Belizeans, at home and abroad. At home and abroad.

All power to the people.