by Marie-Therese Belisle Nweke
Sunday, March 3, 2024
The Caribbean Examination Council (CXC) examinations have all but replaced Britain’s General Certificate School Examinations (GCSE) in Belize and the other CARICOM states. This is laudable. These exams offer up to 33 subjects, some of which include Agricultural Science, Principles of Business, Principles of Accounts, Building Technology, Information Technology, Economics, Electronic Document Preparation and Management, Office Administration and the usual suspects, viz. English, Mathematics, Spanish and the Sciences. But, although Caribbean History is offered, how much of Belize’s own history do students taking the CXC exams from Belize know?
One of the intractable problems facing colonialized entities like Belize, the Caribbean and those on the African continent, is that they assume that because they are ”independent” from direct colonial rule, that they are now post-colonial states. In reality they are not! They most often ignore their colonial history, which leads to their misunderstanding the state of their current existence.
How was Belize, for instance, colonized? If the truth is told, Belize’s institutions were never decolonized. Writing a Constitution was merely daubing icing on gingerbread! The white colonial elites from Britain, who were more or less engaged in offshore colonization, have simply been replaced with local political elites – our so-called “brothers”. Some of them we may even regard as our founding heroes and idols, because they hated the British, though some did not hate for ideological reasons, but for very personal ones. They also ”fought” for our “independence”. However, if we were to examine them closely and dispassionately, they would actually be idols with clay feet. These elites, although they mouthed anti-colonial sentiments, actually changed nothing, but in fact continued the colonial legacy they had inherited; and that’s one overriding reason Belize is still a colonial entity in 2024. Look around! Even the police force, which was ostensibly created to protect the colonial masters and their assets, in the name of law and order, as well as terrorize and traumatize the colonial subjects, is still in psychology and practice the same. In some African states, the police have this motto: “the police is your friend”. But to the African and the Belizean, they KNOW that this is a big, fat lie!
While the colonizers lived in Belize, their real home was actually in the metropole – Britain. When they fell ill, they travelled to Britain to see the doctors there. When they needed a holiday and went on leave, it was not spent at Belize’s beautiful cayes, on the beaches of Placencia, or hiking in the hills of Cayo – but in metropolitan Britain. This is also the pattern of their current local replacements who holiday in America, Canada, Mexico, even the Middle East and South Asia at the drop of a hat. When Belize’s ruling elites are ill, they travel to the US, Mexico, or even Jamaica and Cuba to enter hospitals there. This is because, like the erstwhile colonialists, they pay only lip service to acquire and maintain efficient and sophisticated health facilities throughout ALL of Belize.
For them and their white predecessors, Belize is where they extract things and acquire wealth. This can be from the nation’s forests, the sale of Belize’s land and cayes, licences for the large-scale exploitation of its national resources, whether minerals, beaches, the Great Barrier Reef and all the offerings accompanying it. Everything is outsourced. Everything is imported. Everything of significance is foreign controlled. And, education was and is still designed for Belizeans not to know the truth about themselves. Religion was and is still designed to make them docile and unquestioning. In other words, the colonial system is still very much here, in living colour, as the great Muhammad Ali would say, but it now wears a local face. Thus, the rich are happy, while the people are kept distracted by their poverty and ignorance of whom they are and their role in the grand scheme of things.
Because many Belizeans are ignorant about whom they actually are, and this is embedded in the fact that the history of all our various ethnic groups is not taught in Belize’s schools and colleges, the Creoles, for example, are now the victims of cultural genocide and mis-truths, or rather in these Trumpian times, the objects of alternative facts.