This May 29 was the fiftieth anniversary of a major uprising in the streets of Belize City. It was an African Liberation Day march organized by the United Black Association for Development (UBAD), which became a kind of riot on Albert and Regent Streets when dark descended on the old capital, and afterwards became, to a certain extent, an insurgency, apparently organized on the spot.
Over the decades, I have written several times about this incident(s), but I don’t believe anybody else has. It’s time for other people to comment, or do investigative journalism; otherwise May 29 of 1972 will end up like July 22/23, 1919 — a notable phenomenon swept under the academic rug by powerful people with racist agendas, and then perhaps revived several decades down the road by researchers from abroad.
Whatever, one of the things I want to discuss today is Prohibition, and bootlegging. When the United States outlawed the manufacture and consumption of alcohol in 1919 — this is what is referred to as Prohibition by scholars. (Prohibition lasted until 1933.)
When the U.S. outlawed alcohol, this was not the case in Canada, which is on the northern border of the U.S., and other British possessions in the region. So those gangster businessmen who wanted to do alcohol business in America had to establish contacts with sources in places like Canada and British Honduras.
My father, who will become 99 a few days from now if God is willing, told me that my grandfather, James Bartlett Hyde, used to run alcohol (whisky and rum) from Belize up along the Mexican Gulf Coast to an area in Louisiana named Westwego. I believe Westwego is near to New Orleans, which I think is Louisiana’s largest city. I suppose people from New Orleans would motor to Westwego to pick up the illegal product, whereupon the Belizeans were free to return home.
My grandfather was in the employ of a businessman named Bob Turton (Robert Sydney Turton), who sponsored the trips to Westwego, but there were other prominent Belizeans who owned powerful boats who were in the bootlegging business.
My grandfather on my father’s side was very light-skinned. Family members say that he told them he met Belize people in New Orleans who he believed preferred for him to pretend not to know them.
When I was younger, I lamented the fact that so much of our history here is unwritten. But now I understand that rich foundations and universities in the United States finance writers and researchers to study subjects like these in America, and that is why a written record of so many things exists in the U.S., whereas in Belize none of our youth know anything about Hankin Barrow or Slim Terror Cadle. I’m just saying.
There’s been a lot of talk in the last few weeks about race and ethnicity in Belize. This is because of a proposed amnesty program which will make black Belizeans even more of a minority in The Jewel. I have not said anything publicly about this, one reason being that I’ve said so much over the last five-plus decades.
In my best days, the adult support which enabled me to survive was only about four percent of our population. Today, I am an elder, and Belizean society and culture have changed so much that I have become an onlooker, trust me. Perhaps I am now even a dinosaur. There are cameras and phones and electronic devices/communications all around us. Everything has speeded up, spectacularly.
It is said that if you don’t know your history, you are condemned to repeat it. For me, that was the case with May 29, 1972, 53 years after July 22/23, 1919. Our younger Belizean generations, just like ours was, have been deprived of all the recent history of their forebears.
What we didn’t fully understand way back in the UBAD days was how important violence and the threat of violence were in our daily lives. British Honduras appeared to be a peaceful British enclave surrounded on all sides by violent Latin republics. When the British cast us adrift in 1981, all we knew how to do was “leave it to God.” That is why I have insisted on the value of the Peter Ashdown essay to which I referred a few weeks ago. We Belizeans had been living a colonial lie. We were not ready to co-exist in the violent environment into which political independence thrust us. Our society proceeded to implode.
No disrespect to religion, but in the cases of both Spain and England, they imposed religion on us after they had subjected us to their violence and maintained the threat thereof. That is why Peter Stallard hung Nora Parham. He had to keep us scared. But today, we Belizeans will celebrate the platinum. That is the essence of confusion. Seriously.