In British Honduras, my generation was raised with the Anansi complex, or mindset. In this way of thinking, heroism was a questionable virtue. Martyrdom was definitely taboo. To be a martyr for a cause was to be a complete fool in the Anansi culture. Survival was paramount, and success in deceiving or tricking one’s rival or opponent was the ideal. Hooray. 

    Around us in the republics, however, heroism was extolled. In Mexico, for instance, Francisco Madero, Emiliano Zapata, and Pancho Villa, who were all assassinated in the early twentieth century while fighting for the cause of Mexican freedom, became objects of reverence for the Mexican people, and they remain so to this day. In British Honduras’ Anansi culture, we would have considered such men to be fools. 

    It may be that our population was so small in the colony that life was more precious here than in the republics. Who can say? I know that the first real hero I can definitely discern in our history was Antonio Soberanis, and I believe that one of his parents was a Mexican, and that he was raised in Mexico. Soberanis was a very brave man, and we know a little bit about his heroism during the 1930s, when colonialism and racism were the order of the day under the British.

    The names of the slave rebels called Will and Sharper have been mentioned as the leaders of a slave revolt in 1820 in the settlement of Belize. Details of the revolt, however, are very sketchy. Still, respect to Will and Sharper. 

    When it comes to the largest slave revolt ever in the settlement, in 1773, we have no names to give respect to. At the peak of this uprising on the Belize Old River, there were fifty slaves involved in the revolt, and the archives written by Sir John Burdon, British Governor here in 1926, state that nineteen of the rebels managed to reach the Rio Hondo and crossed over into Mexican territory, where they achieved freedom.

    Now when we look at our present sociological conditions and culture in The Jewel, we can see a great shift in thinking from the time of my generation in the 1950s and 1960s. Since the gang wars began here in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Belize has developed a culture where the willingness and ability to kill, earn young men respect in our community. In my time, it was mainly in sports that a young male made his bones. (I will not discuss sex in this column.)

     When I was growing up in the 1950s, the British administration of justice was hanging Belizeans right and left. There was an atmosphere of fear at the base of our community of which we were probably not aware as such. We considered our situation to be law-and-order, discipline. We held murderers in awe, and there was one named Marcus O’Brien, whose bravery was so sensational at the time of his execution in the old Belize City prison that he became mythical in reputation.           

    As we entered self-government in the middle 1960s, hangings became less frequent in Belize. And I think you older Belizeans will recall the 1970s as a golden age of sports, music, culture and so on in Belize. In looking back, we can see that although there were almost no hangings in the 1970s, an atmosphere of discipline remained in the old capital to the extent that the aforementioned sports, music and culture could flourish in a favorable climate.

     Then political independence came in 1981. There has only been one hanging since then, that of Noel Bowers in 1985, and there are vital questions about that hanging which have not been discussed publicly. Then the gangs came, and now we are looking at more than three decades of a culture which did not exist here before, a culture where young black males have become completely different in mindset from the time of my childhood. Gun violence and murder have become fashionable. Convictions are extremely rare. It is absolute insanity. What happened? Who is to blame? Who cares?

    This is, of course, the voice of one crying in the wilderness. There are evil natives who took over Belize after independence. They have become wealthy beyond measure. We Belizeans sold our cayes, our lands, our passports, and now it is said that we are selling our bodies. Belize does not belong to us any more. I have a sense now of how older Palestinians must feel. 

    Out there, there were neoliberal forces with which elite natives got into bed. So now there are those of us who have to sleep on the sidewalks in the sun and in the rain. Turn your heads and pretend that you just don’t see.