The late, great Dr. Leroy Taegar used to say to us: “Christianity makes you fearful; Islam makes you fearless.”

In Belize, one cannot talk critically about religion, because the state-financed education system has always been controlled by religious organizations. Parents want the best for their children. This usually means trying to send their children to the best schools. If a parent is poor, he is intimidated by the school/religion, so that he actually will punish his child if that child has something critical to say about the school/religion.

I remember that when UBAD was headquartered on Euphrates Avenue in 1971/1972 near to St. Ignatius School and Church, there was a priest who was routinely molesting girl children. He had a pickup truck, and he would take them driving in the passenger seat of the vehicle. I can call his name. In fact, I know a lady who is still alive who told me personally about what the priest had done to her.

I was raised as a Roman Catholic. When I was attending St. John’s College, around 1960/61, I was a member of the so-called Sodality, which was led by the late Fr. Thomas Donovan, S. J. On several Sundays we travelled by truck up the Old Northern Highway. We would stop at villages like Sandhill, Santana, Maskall, and so on, where Donovan would say Mass for the villagers. I was an acolyte at these Masses.

One of the catechists on these trips was the late Carolee Chanona, who later became a nun. She was a quiet, spiritual young lady, a bit older than myself, and never flirted the way some young ladies do.

When Hurricane Hattie struck Belize in October of 1961, I was 14 years old, still in the Sodality, and I believe that it was in the following year, 1962, that the Sodality held a so-called closed retreat for its members. I believe the Sodality included a couple of my classmates who are now deceased, specifically Dr. Neil Garbutt and Jorge Julian Castillo.

In a closed retreat, you would stay on the SJC Landivar campus for three days, and eat and sleep there. A priest, in this case Fr. Frank Stobie, S. J., would preach to us several times a day about sin and hellfire and stuff like that. So, we would be programmed into a high state of spirituality, if you can call it that.

After the retreat, Fr. Donovan interviewed each of us individually at the Faculty Building. I was now 15, I believe, and Fr. Donovan made a strong recommendation for me to become a priest. I was quite alarmed by this suggestion, had trouble sleeping later, and sought counsel from the late Fr. John Stochl, S. J., who helped to calm me down.

Stochl was a pretty good friend of mine, although he had a sardonic sense of humor, a humor which could actually be bitter. I remember that Dartmouth sent me a form to fill out when I was leaving Belize in 1965. The form would tell the school what courses I wanted to take in my first term. I was interested in philosophy, I remember, but Stochl’s opinion was that such a course might cause me to lose my faith. 

Before I continue, let me say this: I rate SJC very highly academically, because their program prepared me to a level where I was able to survive at Dartmouth, where there were brilliant students, some of whom had gone to expensive prep schools to get them ready for the Ivy League.

I began to drift away from Catholicism, and then in the winter of 1967, after reading Malcolm X’s autobiography, I became a sympathizer of Islam, so to speak. I had close friends in UBAD when I returned home who were Muslims, such as Charles X Eagan, Ismail Shabazz, and Rudolph Farrakhan, but I never became a practising Muslim. One time in the early 1980s, under the influence of another Muslim, the late Odinga Lumumba, I tried to follow the Ramadan regimen, but I dropped out after a while.

John Henrik Clarke frequently pointed out that Arab Muslims were doing wicked things to East Africans at the same time European Christians were conquering and enslaving West Africans. The Europeans conquered our ancestors with violence, transported us to America, and worked us to death for free.

The Europeans sought to convert our ancestors to Christianity, mainly through the schools which they built in places like Belize. The massive contradiction here was that Christ was a teacher of love and non-violence, whereas our rulers/masters were practitioners of murder and violence.

Here is where a great confusion was engendered in our ancestors. Confusion or confusion not, the power reality of our ancestors’ situation was that the only hope they had for the upliftment of their children lay in the enrollment of their children in Christian schools owned and administrated by imperialists, slave owners, and white supremacists.

In 2024, the situation has not changed much. The education we receive from the Christian schools equipped us well to survive when we migrated to America, but half our Belizean children are left by the wayside each year, because the educational system is fundamentally elitist. Here is where the so-called gang problem originates, with uneducated, unskilled children who are victims of an educational system which emphasizes religion instead of liberation.