“Over two thousand persons transferred from Black River as a result of the Convention of 1786, a further refinement of the Treaty of Paris of 1783, which had officially ended the American Revolution. In this accord, Great Britain gave up all claims to the Mosquito Shore and evacuated its settlements there in return for extended woodcutting rights in the area of Belize.”
-pg. 19, PEOPLING BELIZE: Chapters in Migration, by St. John Robinson, NICH/ISCR, 2006
Rufus X and I were talking for the second time in two weeks. Rufus’ vote had been critical in the breakup of UBAD in early 1973, because it was because the Unity Congress, headed by the Rev. Gerald Fairweather of Brooklyn, New York, had treated the UBAD representatives, Rufus and the late Wilfred Nicholas, Sr., disrespectfully, that I had suggested, as president, to the UBAD executive that perhaps we needed to pretend we were talking to the ruling PUP.
At my dad’s 100th birthday party in early June this year, in the presence of Nuri Muhammad, Rufus finally explained that his dislike for Mr. Price’s ruling PUP (because of an incident one night at the old Stanley Field Airport when he, Rufus, was a teenager) was such that even the issue of respect or disrespect from Rev. Fairweather’s Unity Congress was not enough to make him willing to abide any talk about conversation with the PUP.
Throughout all the 50 years since that time, Rufus had never answered me when I asked him about a vote which I had always thought was somewhat contradictory. Whatever the case, Rufus’ vote had made it a 5-5 deadlock in the UBAD executive, and it was downhill from there for the group.
Initially, after our UBAD division, there was hostility between the disagreeing sides, but it seemed to me that Rufus X and I had begun communicating after a couple years, so much so that in early 1979 we had travelled together to New Orleans through Mexico by bus.
Rufus X, after the split in UBAD, had become a very militant supporter of the new UDP, founded by Rev. Fairweather in September of 1973 and led unofficially by the late Dean Lindo. When I asked him when it was that he had split with the UDP, he said that it was after the UDP had won power for the first time in 1984.
There had been an occasion during the years when Rufus had fought in court for custody of two of his children and taken them away from their mother, his common-law (wife). He spoke to me in glowing terms about the good qualities of his common-law. But he explained that he had specifically told her not to send their daughter to vacation with her family in Chicago. Rufus has a deep dislike of America and things American. His common-law had quietly defied him and sent their daughter to Chicago. This caused the breakup and led to the custody fight.
So when, during our recent conversations, I suggested to Rufus that perhaps those hundreds of thousands of Belizeans who had migrated to the United States over the years had made the right decision, I was surprised that Rufus did not express a strong negative opinion about my suggestion. I think that he is as much concerned as I am about the upcoming ICJ deliberations on the Guatemalan claim to Belize, a claim generations of Belizeans used to denounce unconditionally as “unfounded.”
When I was growing up in British Honduras, I knew nothing about America’s declaration of the so-called Monroe Doctrine in 1823. This would have taken place decades after settlers/slaveowners of British origin, and their slave chattel, were forced to leave the Mosquito Coast of Nicaragua in 1787 and came to the Settlement of Belize in “The Bay” because of the Convention of 1786 and the Treaty of Paris (1783). This is how my great great great grandmother on my father’s side, Adney Broaster, and her enslaved mother, Eve Broaster, came to the Settlement of Belize in 1787.
After Mexico and Central America gained independence from Spain in 1821, there was a black Mexican president in 1829 by the name of Vicente Guerrero. At the time, Texas was a part of Mexico, which used to be called “New Spain.” Road contact in those days two centuries ago was so primitive that sea contact between the northern coast of the Yucatan and Texas was much easier and quicker than road contact between the two areas and Mexico City, the capital of New Spain. When Vicente Guerrero outlawed slavery in Mexico, white Americans who had drifted south into Texas became very angry and began the various rebellions which ended up with the United States grabbing Texas from Mexico. After the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, the U.S. grabbed Mexican territory all the way from Texas west to California.
I didn’t know anything about these things as a child/youth in British Honduras. More important, perhaps, I didn’t know anything about the two treaties between the United Kingdom and the United States — Clayton-Bulwer (1850) and Dallas-Clarendon (1856), which were signed just a few years before the 1859 Treaty between the United Kingdom and Guatemala, the treaty which we Belizeans have regarded as Gospel for generations after generations.
Because of the 1859 Treaty and because of the impressive military presence of the British in the colony in the twentieth century, the Monroe Doctrine, Guadalupe-Hidalgo, Clayton-Bulwer, and Dallas-Clarendon were totally ignored by native Belizeans. These matters we ignored will now play a role in the ICJ, one suspects. They will play a role because the muscle of the superpower United States, whose proposals to settle the Guatemalan claim were exposed and rejected by Mr. Goldson in 1966, will surface big time at the ICJ. All the MBEs and OBEs in Belizean hands will be of no account at The Hague. This is because the settlement at The Hague will cater to the mineral, industrial, and strategic interests of the mighty America. I suppose we will end up hoping that the British put in a good word for us. Hoping, I say.