During all these long months of breathless hype and hoopla in the Western press about the April 29, 2011 marriage of Prince William of Great Britain and Miss Kate Middleton, nary a word has been said about the financial cost of the extravaganza. This week, finally, CNN estimated the cost of the royal wedding at US$ 80 million. This, to borrow the words of Lee Van Cleef, is “a tidy sum.”
It is not that we want to be spoilsports. Young love, you know, is such a precious thing, blessed, politics should not be introduced into it. But, you see, this Friday’s wedding actually represents a massive public relations support on the part of the British royal family, and indeed the United Kingdom itself. Those of us all over the world whose ancestors were victimized by the British are expected to get all caught up in the William-Kate excitement, and in the process feel all warm and cuddly inside towards people who did us great wrongs. Channel 5, a sort of British television station in Belize, will be broadcasting all the pomp and pageantry of the wedding, and it is quite possible that other media in Belize will do the same. Internationally, the value of the goodwill generated towards the British will be far more than the money spent to marry William and Kate.
You will remember that in 1997 when Princess Diana, William’s mother, died in a mysterious and horrific car accident in Paris, the image of the British royal family had reached an all time low. This monarchy business is a relic of medieval times, and the goings on of the royal individuals can be ridiculous at times, and sometimes pathetic. The British as a people, however, take their royal family business seriously, and they insist that people like us, former British subjects who still sometimes behave like British minions, do the same.
Well, at this newspaper what we take seriously is this US$80 million business. Roots Belizeans should remember where Friday’s moneys came from – the enslavement and colonizing of our people, our ancestors whom the British called “the white man’s burden.” When our elders rebelled against British colonialism and imperialism in 1950, they were rebelling against the stinking filth of the open sewers which criss-crossed our then capital city. Without their knowing it at the time, our ancestors were rebelling against the asbestos pipes which were used to deliver the dribbling water to the standpipes on street corners. Our ancestors were rebelling against the fact that in 1926 when one solitary Englishman, Baron Bliss, decided to give us some money, in London the British judges ruled that a big chunk of the money had to go back to England in the form of taxes. And today, we can see that those Belizeans who came before us were rebelling against the Guatemalan claim to The Jewel which the British have left hanging over our heads because they refused to honor a treaty commitment. Even the little it would have cost to build that dirt road in the nineteenth century, penurious Albion refused to pay.
When you walk around the former capital city which remains the nation’s population center, and you see the human wreckage lying on the benches and sidewalks or wandering in the streets, understand that these represent the victims of a way of life which involved total white supremacy for centuries in this settlement. It is not that we enjoy all the moaning and groaning. But, these things stare us in the face day after day after day. It was intended that we should meekly accept our degraded lot in life because we should have acknowledged our innate, congenital inferiority. It was not intended by the masters that their inhumanity, racism and brutality should be exposed as we at this newspaper have been exposing it for more than four decades.
Please, we wish William and Kate well. Thinking about it, we have to, because it is we who are paying for the wedding. And, after all, never forget, they are “Friends of Belize.” Hip, hip, hooray.