Monday, July 24, 2023

Anyone who has ever been employed in a job where the “boss” behaves like a tyrant, and one can feel the sense of insecurity at possibly being “fired” at any moment, can have a vague idea of what our African forebears felt daily over the period of a few hundred years when they were enslaved and it had become a way of life. For someone to have that kind of power over you is “not’n nice”; it makes one think evil thoughts, and expend emotional energy just to “hold it down.” It is not hard to understand that life expectancy was not very long for enslaved people, considering the malnutrition and hard work, but more importantly the living under stress, pressure, on a daily basis. Perhaps that is why as a general rule, up to today, Black people tend to experience more health issues due to high blood pressure than other races, according to the scientists.

In Belize, for some years now, through the agitation of the UBAD Educational Foundation, we have been commemorating August 1 as African Emancipation Day, as it is the day in 1838 when the enslaved people in all British colonies in the Caribbean, including Belize, were officially set free, emancipated.

In those days, this Belize town was almost ninety percent Black or brown, with some mixing with the white slave masters and also with the Maya, the Miskita (Waika) from Nicaragua, and others. Through the generations of oppressive laws by the ruling white “settlers”, the various African languages of the slaves from different African tribes – Ibo, Ashanti, Mandingo, etc. – were all lost, as they developed the Kriol language, out of English and African influence, as the means of communication with each other and the “Bakra”, who eventually caught on too. So, almost everybody in Belize today speaks some form of Kriol along with whatever other language they are comfortable with – the languages of the Maya, the Garifuna, the Mestizos, the Mennonites, the Chinese, the Palestinians, the Lebanese, the East Indians, etc. etc.—along with the official English. Belize is a real melting pot; and somehow, we all seem to get along. When trouble “bruk out”, because of stress in our living conditions and different relationships, it seldom has anything to do with ethnicity; it’s almost always personal conflicts that unfortunately sometimes lead to people getting hurt, or worse, killed. Hopefully, we can continue keeping this pot from boiling over.

Emancipation Day is not magic. True, it must have been a massive release of emotions on that glorious day, just the thought of being FREE! Free at Last?! But soon after, the reality hit home, and they realized that in order to eat, they had to earn money to buy food; and without land, which they were generally restricted from owning anyhow, they had to go back to the same “Maasa” and look for a job. And so, the matter of “slave wages” came about. But now “we free”.

Unfortunately, due to the classic “divide and rule” strategy employed by the British rulers of the then colonial society, emancipation did not erase the color prejudice which they later encouraged by giving the special jobs in the civil service and banks and other clerical duties to lighter-skinned Kriols. Thus, the saying, if yo white, yo alright; if yo brown, stick around; if yo black, get da back.

So, we were emancipated from the physical chains of slavery, but our minds were still enslaved, with prejudice against one another because of color and status in society. To further reinforce the notion that black is ugly, and white is right; even up to this day, many of the religious denominations still put a picture of a white Jesus for the black and brown members of the congregation, adults and children, to bow to and adore. And they say they are preaching love.

But when UBAD burst on the scene in 1969 and started shouting “Black Power!”, and “Black is Beautiful!”, they said we were “preaching racism”. To this day, they never say that to the churches which continue to disseminate pictures of a white Jesus, and even build life-sized statues of a white Jesus, that inculcates a sense of inferiority and self-hate in children of color. Up to today, some of our poor, mentally shackled people still “curse” one another “black” as if it is a bad thing. We still have to get the chains from off our minds.

The July 22-23, 1919 Ex-Servicemen Riot (or Revolution?), which none of our schools taught us anything about under the colonial system, and even after our Independence, was all about our Black men (of all hues) returning from World War I, during which they were subjected to the most blatant form of racism; and realizing when they got back home to Belize after the war that the racism was just more subtle here, where they were not given the land and the pay they had been promised. Those men organized themselves in military fashion, and marched down the main streets and “bruk up everyting”. And their women folk, including the “Bembe women”, and many other town inhabitants joined in the action too. For one night, Belize was in revolution, till the Governor reportedly had to catch a ride out to sea for safety onboard a ship in harbor.

We’ve never heard the whole story about that event, and probably never will, but we’ve heard enough to get an idea that our forebears were “black and proud”, and ready to fight for their rights and “let despots flee”. For sure, the Marcus Garvey message in the Negro World newspaper, which had been secretly circulated among the servicemen overseas, had helped to enlighten and ignite their spirits when they confronted the injustice at home.

Perhaps we would have become another Haiti if some of our brothers had not decided to make a truce and allow the Governor and his officials to resume their authority in the colony. We don’t know the names of all the heroes that day. Some went to jail. One of the leading truce negotiators, the legendary Samuel Haynes, who penned the words that became our national anthem, left Belize shortly after to become a prominent member of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association in the USA, from which he never returned.

And imagine, all this happened just two decades plus after the colonial government had been sponsoring big annual celebrations of the 1798 Battle of St. George’s Caye, beginning with its Centenary in 1898; this a decade after one Simon Lamb had unsuccessfully petitioned the governor to sponsor the celebration of the 1888 Jubilee of Emancipation Day, which had occurred on August 1, 1838.

There is a lot to be researched and for our young generation to learn about the history of their Land of the Free. The message remains as it did in 1969 – Black is Beautiful! Peace and love is what we need, but it must come with justice. And when you walk the streets of this old capital, and you see a brother who looks like he’s lost it, or is bedraggled, and fighting starvation and ignorance, and especially if he is of a very dark skin color, remember this and try to understand: he is probably eight generations removed from his enslaved forebears’ being exploited for free labor all their lives, and then for four more years when they were promised freedom in 1834; and when they were finally FREED in 1838, their former slavemaster was “financially compensated” by the British crown for the property that they had lost when this man’s forebears were finally FREE. The eighth-generation descendant of that slavemaster does not need your help right now, not likely; but have some mercy on that dirty, struggling, impoverished soul in the street who is probably carrying some deep generational, emotional and psychological “baggage” and somehow became overwhelmed by the “system.”

Peace and love, and Happy Emancipation Day, Belize!