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The priests and nuns are very powerful inside the Garifuna intellectual leadership, and the background to this goes way back to the early twentieth century. (Helpful information on the history of that era, a hundred years ago in British Honduras, is contained in Mr. Frank Arana?s seminal work on the history of Garifuna teachers in this country. I am sure this book is available at the Angelus Press.)


Discrimination against the Carib people, as the Garinagu were then called, was powerful inside the Creole community, which dominated the lower and middle level civil service jobs the British colonial masters had made available. Belmopan did not exist back then, remember, and all the government departments were located in the old capital, Belize, which was the center of Creole life.


If you were a Garifuna child in the early twentieth century who was more interested in academic/intellectual pursuits than physical labour, then there was no future for you in the colony. The Roman Catholic priests and nuns saw the tremendous waste of talent which was taking place, and they offered teaching jobs to bright young Caribs. They sent Carib teachers into all the villages and towns of the colony, and the work of Carib teachers was historic and superb. The Catholic Church and its school system benefited enormously from this work, but remember, it was the Catholic Church which had offered opportunity where there had been none. Garifuna intellectuals were properly grateful, and this accounts for a lot of the closeness, over the years, between the Church and Garifuna leadership.


Now I explained to you in my column in this Tuesday?s newspaper, how I came to be a Catholic, though my mother is Methodist. In those days back then, almost all Creoles were Anglican or Methodist. The first Roman Catholic Church in the colony was the Holy Redeemer Church, built in the 1880?s where the Northside of Belize (City) began/begins ? on North Front Street. Southside was all non-Catholic. My father, the eldest of five children, was the only one baptized as a Catholic. Blame his father for that. As a result, I was one of the few young Creoles in Belize in the 1950?s who was a Catholic.


I went to Holy Redeemer Boys School between 1952 and 1959. The Holy Redeemer diocesan property (between Queen Street and Hyde?s Lane) runs from North Front Street all the way north to New Road, and in those days the Church had a building on New Road which they used as a hostel to lodge young male students from the districts, mostly Garifuna, who were attending St. John?s College. I met guys like the late Greg Arana, Harry Servio and Callistus Cayetano at the hostel before I even began S.J.C. in 1959.


My home was a unique Creole one in that we were not taught to discriminate against Carib people. My dad was/is very good friends with the brilliant Carib economist, Cornelius ?Pat? Cacho, and the great Joe Mendez was a teammate of my dad?s on the All Stars football team. When I went to S.J.C., most of the black students were Carib, or at least it seemed that way, because much a higher percentage of Caribs were Catholics, as opposed to Creoles. I saw more similarities, then, between myself and the Caribs, than differences.


After I finished university and was thrust into Belizean public and political life, I learned a lot more about the history of discrimination against the Carib people by the dominant Creole tribe. I do not blame any Garifuna for feeling hostility or resentment towards Creoles. But, as a black revolutionary, I will not tolerate the Roman Catholic Church to encourage and exploit divisions between the African tribes in Belize. I will fight to the death against the machinations of the religious fanatics.


Sometime in 1996, Ismail Omar Shabazz, I believe, gave me the stats about the proposed formation of a Central American Black Organization (CABO). Those Belizeans who were involved with the Honduras-based movers of this CABO process, were National Garifuna Council leaders, the most prominent being Augustine Flores. But the founders of CABO included black people from Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras and even Guatemala who could be considered, for lack of a better description, ?Creoles.? And some of these people knew, or found out, that there was a large black Creole population in Belize, a Creole population larger than Belize?s Garifuna population. (Honduras, incidentally, has at least 200,000 Garinagu, and also many Creoles.)


The history of this CABO thing in Belize is not documented, and I am not a historian. So I am not sure, for instance, when Nzinga-Lillette Barkley-Waite, became a part of our initiative to say to Augustine Flores ? listen, if anybody is going to represent black Creoles in CABO, it?s going to be UBAD, reorganized if necessary, not the Belize Kriol Council. Flores wanted the Kriol Council, because he would have been in control. The common thread between NGC and BKC is the Church, Jack. I am talking about the same Church which has spent 35 years fighting against African and Mayan History.


It was because of Partridge Street?s determination to prevent CABO from being used as a tool in religious or imperialist schemes, that the UBAD Educational Foundation (UEF) was organized in March of 1996.

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