by Colin Hyde

I know Emancipation Day is a big thing in the Caribbean; and the UEF under the leadership of Ms. Virginia Echols, and now with Ms. Yaya Marin Coleman, sees it as a big thing too. Maybe I’ve never thought about Emancipation Day enough. I said that maybe I haven’t thought about it enough. I didn’t have to think about it, him, when I met Marcus Garvey. Marcus excites me. I feel proud every time I think about how our people — black, brown, and paylkaypm Kriols — embraced Marcus when he came to our shores, and that our Samuel Haynes went with him to help him in his great work.

Many detractors of the Battle of Saint George’s Caye say our enslaved ancestors had nothing to celebrate about, that nothing changed for them after the Battle. We won’t go into that. In many ways Emancipation Day was just changing one set of “shackles” for another. Emancipation didn’t begin until Marcus Garvey came to our shores and started to free our minds from 300 years of mental slavery.

Afro Americans celebrated Monday, June 19, as their emancipation day. You know, Afro-American elites didn’t accept Marcus. My take on that is that they were jealous. I believe the Elijah Muhammad Muslims would be a much larger group if it didn’t have such a strong Caribbean connection. I understand that many of the detractors side with the Jewish charge that the Black Muslims are anti-Semitic, a charge which I think hasn’t been explored, hasn’t been allowed to be explored enough. Afro Americans prefer the Black Lives Matter, which is an LGBT/Afro mix. Anyway, the Afro American story is very similar to ours, so we can’t allow pettiness or small divisions to keep the train off the tracks.

To those who celebrated this Monday, and we can be sure that many Belizeans were in the festivities because Belizeans abroad feel love for America the same way new Belizeans feel love for the Jewel, Happy Juneteenth! This story I found expanded my knowledge of the Afro-American experience, the Afro experience all over the Americas, and you might find some value in it too.

John Blake, in a CNN piece titled “As the nation celebrates Juneteenth, it’s time to get rid of these three myths about slavery”, gives us some notes about their story that are very comparable to ours.

Blake says it is a big myth “that enslaved African Americans were docile, passive victims who had to wait until White abolitionists and ‘The Great Emancipator’ Abraham Lincoln freed them.” We’ve heard a story like this here. Our Afro ancestors have been called fools for engaging in 1798.

I’m no kind of purist, so I don’t get affected when I hear the word “slaves”, but I have a little trouble with the word “emancipation”. That sounds like our Afro ancestors were given their freedom. We know it was a combination of things that forced the end of enslavement. Let’s just say I noh comfortable with it.

Hmm, it is a very complicated story. An old Compre friend of mine, Glenn Fuller, posted up some historical reports about old British Honduras, and some of the notes show that a male European ancestor of mine had many slaves, and an Afro-European female ancestor of mine had quite a few slaves too. So, some of my ancestors were owned by some of my ancestors. I’m not afraid to write about these things. You want to dissect me? Could Shylock have gotten his pound of flesh from Antonio?

Blake said many Americans weren’t “freed” after their Civil War, 1861-1865, ended. Blake said many white people fought to keep their “slaves”, and many of them did extremely cruel things after the war. Blake cited the work of Clint Smith, who reported on the narrative of Susan Merritt, who spoke about the days after the war. Merritt said: “Lots of Negroes were killed after freedom…bushwhacked, shot down while they were trying to get away…You could see lots of Negroes hanging from trees in Sabine bottom right after freedom. They would catch them swimming across Sabine River and shoot them.”

Some of the white people in the defeated south, the Confederates, ran to Belize. There’s written history about their activities here, particularly in the Toledo District. Phylicia Pelayo, in a piece in Belize Living Heritage, at the website belizelivingheritage.org, said that in that district they “bought property from Young, Toledo and Co.”, lands that “encompass Jacintoville, Eldridgeville, Forest Home and Cattle-Landing.” In 1872, they brought East Indians “into the Toledo Settlement as indentured laborers to work on the sugar plantations.” Their workers had to get permission to leave the plantations.

Blake says it’s a myth that captive Africans needed to be civilized. Blake said “they came to the US as fully formed individuals, not blank canvases”, that historian Leslie Wilson has pointed out that “the thumbprints of the culture that formerly enslaved people created are now stamped on virtually every facet of American culture”, that “by the Civil War, Black people had already changed American concepts of architecture, burial, music, storytelling and medicine.”

The third myth, according to Blake, is that “pie-in-the-sky” Christianity brainwashed enslaved Africans. Blake said theology professor, Leon Harris, said the Europeans “blacked out portions of the Bible that had anything to do with freedom, anything to do with equality, anything to do with God delivering folk.” Blake said historians like Harris noted that most slaves latched on to stories like “God freeing the Israelites from Egyptian captivity”, and that it is no accident that the Black leaders who led the freedom struggles, “from Nat Turner to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., were Christian ministers”, that “instead of Christianity being a religion of African oppression, many interpreted it as a religion of freedom.” I think there’s enough sense there to make those who don’t have the sense get the sense.

I can’t pass on this last piece to sign, seal and deliver the message. Blake said the author of the book, Slave Religion, Albert J. Raboteau, said “former slaves remade Christianity, it didn’t remake them”, and that “to describe slave religion as merely otherworldly is inaccurate, for the slaves believed that God had acted, was acting, and would continue to act within human history and within their own particular history as a peculiar people just as long ago he had acted on behalf of another chosen people, biblical Israel.”

Thank you, thank you, Brother Blake, for your very enlightening piece. Let those who have eyes to see, see. There are many discussions we children of the enslaved Africans are yet to have, and need to have, but those discussions are being crowded out. There are myths that were and are being spun to check the Elijah Muhammad Muslims, and myths of a different kind to paint the Black Christians as stooges for white supremacists. The loud talk keeps the conversation on the surface, and we so desperately need to dive so we can see the bigger picture.

Don’t look so smug, counselor

I think Dean Barrow looked too comfortable when he discussed the victory for his clients at Commerce Bight. The loser here is Belize, Belizeans; we will have to pay, and every cent taken out of the Central Bank coffers to put in the pockets of private companies and their lawyers, is a cent less to meet the needs of the people. We can do the math. It’s not just paper. We have to hope the bite isn’t too large. Every cent we have to pay out cuts into the grocery basket, reduces the funds available to buy medicines for the hospitals, reduces the support for our schools.

This chi-ching happiness for private companies and their lawyers, okay, the warped system says you deserve it. Of course we don’t want crocodile tears. We know winners don’t cry. But contain the smiling face. It’s salt in our wounds.