When an opportunity arose for my second son to enter politics in 1994, I did not have a problem with his becoming a People’s United Party official. I had spent time over the years thinking about who I was, in the sense of political philosophy, and I knew that I was more PUP than UDP. I am referring now to the original philosophy of the PUP, not the thinking which has dominated the PUP since 1989.
I had not always been like this. My mother is a Methodist and she was a supporter of Philip Goldson’s National Independence Party (NIP) when I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s. You are what your mother is. My mother was an NIP, so I, her first born, was an NIP.
By the early 1960s, a serious change had become evident in the PUP. The party had moved away from its urban, black working class foundation, represented by its electoral alliance with the Betson/Middleton General Workers Union (GWU) from 1950 to 1957. After 1957, the PUP began to become more rural, and developed a Mestizo flavor, so to speak.
British Honduras was a small place, and where the party politics was concerned, there were exceptions to all rules. Those exceptions basically derived from personal and family complexities. Let me give you two examples.
The first example is the marriage of my parents. My father is a Roman Catholic, the only one of his parents’ six children who was so baptized. As the PUP rose to power in the 1950s, my father during that same period was rising in the ranks of the British Honduras civil service. I think my father was a PUP sympathizer, at a time when almost all of Belize’s public officers were NIP supporters. I believe my father’s PUP sympathies came from his father, James Bartlett Hyde.
The second example I will give you of family complexities in Belize’s party politics is the marriage of the said James Bartlett Hyde’s sister to a ranking member of the family which was perhaps the most important NIP family in British Honduras – the Fairweathers. Henry Fairweather, the eminent surveyor and NIP general election candidate, was married for all his adult life to Victoria Beeks, the sister of James Bartlett Hyde.
James Bartlett Hyde was the son of Absalom Hyde, who was a blacksmith and machinist in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Absalom Hyde’s children and grandchildren ran a machine shop on North Front Street. That was between Mapp and Douglas Jones Streets, on the northern side of the Haulover Creek of the Belize Old River.
The Hyde machine people did a lot of work for the native business mogul, Robert Sydney Turton. They repaired the machines in Turton’s boats, trucks and other equipment. My grandfather traveled to the Gulf ports of the United States working in Turton’s boats. Thus, my grandfather, a light-skinned Creole, had visited Corpus Christi and Galveston (Texas), New Orleans (Louisiana), Biloxi (Mississippi), Mobile (Alabama), Tampa (Florida), Savannah (Georgia), Charleston (South Carolina), and so on.
In those days, George Price was Mr. Turton’s personal secretary, so that when Mr. Turton pushed the young George Cadle into party politics in 1944, the Hydes from the machine shop, admirers and, to an extent, employees of Mr. Turton’s, were all pro-Price. And they became PUP when that party was formally organized in 1950. Now you see from whence my father’s PUP sympathies no doubt derived.
When the PUP emerged in 1950, there was an established Creole elite which had arisen in the civil service of British Honduras. Those families included, off the top, the Longsworths, the Fairweathers, the Barrows, the Youngs, the Pitts, the Staines, and so on. To a significant extent, these Creole elite families have now moved into the law, become wealthy, and remained powerful in the Creole community, and indeed in the nation state. (I don’t think the Elringtons would have been considered Creole elite in the 1950s, but by the 1970s they had certainly entered those ranks.)
(For whatever the reasons, the Courtenays are the exception to the rule in that, a Creole elite family, they went with Mr. Price’s PUP in the late 1950s after originally supporting British colonialism earlier in the decade.)
Where the radical black politics of the last 40 years is concerned, the name which outsiders will most readily recognize is that of X Hyde. This column, however, is intended to begin the explanation of the irregularities in my past where the largely UDP descendants of the elite Creole families are concerned. Just as there are some Garifuna who are skeptical of Adele Ramos because her mother is a Creole, there are elite Creoles who reject yours truly because my family’s “credentials” are not classic, so to speak.
There has been a pattern of disrespect shown to myself and Kremandala by elements of the elite Creole families. That is why, where those who are not the cognoscenti would normally expect me to flex, I actually have to withdraw into the background. After 40 years, I know my place. Believe me. In Belize, it is not your deeds that count. More important is who is your grandfather.
Power to the people. Power in the struggle.