Tuesday, August 15, 2023

The police in Belize City found one of our 12-year-old Belizean children of African descent with an automatic pistol over the weekend. When something like this isn’t happening, our teenagers are murdering each other in the name of various gangs, in pursuance of various beefs, and in revenge for murders over the years.

Why are we in this dreadful sociological state? It is because of our dreadful economic state. The only way roots people can eat in this population center, where we do not grow anything and where there are no jobs for “at-risk” youth, is by participating in criminal activity, primarily the movement and sale of illegal drugs. The youth violence in Belize City involves turf wars for the acquisition and increase of profits. Or you can just call it food.

This kind of civil war amongst our youth of African descent has been going on since the late 1980s, when the gang culture arrived down here from Los Angeles. South Central Los Angeles had become a hotbed for cocaine and crack cocaine traffic in the 1980s, when the American presidency of Ronald Reagan was trying to finance the so-called “contras” in their war in Nicaragua. These “contras” were being used by the American deep state to try to overthrow the Sandinista government which had overthrown the Nicaraguan dictator, Anastacio Somoza, in 1979.  

The American deep state first used the Panamanian dictator, Manuel Noriega to move cocaine through Central America and American states like Arkansas to South Central Los Angeles, which was the no. 1 distribution center for the products. (Noriega went rogue, where the Americans were concerned, in the late 1980s.)

Unfortunately for Belize, the majority of our diaspora population lives in Los Angeles and the Los Angeles area. Our youth became involved in a drug trade organized by the American deep state, and then our Los Angeles-based youth brought the Crips and Bloods culture of drugs and violence to Belize in the late 1980s.

This may be a radical change of subject, but this coming Thursday, August 17, is the birthday of the late Marcus Mosiah Garvey, who was born in 1887 in the Jamaican Parish of St. Ann’s. Garvey became the greatest and most powerful Black man of the twentieth century after he travelled through Central America and finally established his international headquarters in New York City in 1917 or so. 

After Garvey visited British Honduras in 1921, our country’s first native millionaire, Isaiah Morter, bequeathed his immense fortune (which included Caye Chapel) to the cause of “African redemption.” He did not bequeath his wealth to Garvey personally and directly. That was Morter’s mistake. His money never did reach Garvey after Morter died in 1923.      

White supremacists apparently decided that Garvey had to be destroyed. He had become too powerful and too dangerous. In 1922, Garvey was arrested on a framed mail fraud charge having to do with his shipping company, the Black Star Line. He was tried in 1923, and freed on bail between 1923 and 1925. Garvey was imprisoned in the Atlanta State Penitentiary between 1925 and 1927, after which he was deported to Jamaica.

While Garvey was in jail, a group of charlatans got ahold of his organization, the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), and hence the controversy which developed involving Morter’s estate arose. It may be assumed that multiple attorneys became involved, and this became one of the most mysterious and complex cases ever. 

Deported to Jamaica, the great Garvey suffered humiliations and indignities which would have been inconceivable a few years before. But there was something remarkable which was accomplished because of Marcus Garvey’s message and inspiration: that was the birth of a religion which became known as Rastafarianism, a religion which was persecuted for decades by the British colonial government in Jamaica. Rastafarianism, however, grew and grew until it produced an international musical prophet — Robert Nesta Marley.

It may be said that Rastafarianism destroyed the doctrine of the blonde-haired, blue-eyed Jesus Christ which had dominated the Christian religions in the Western hemisphere.

The Morter case was to be finally decided in 1939 by the British Privy Council, and the estate was not going to Garvey; it would have revived his career, but he had been ticketed for destruction, as I have said before. And so, in 1940 Garvey was marooned in London around the time Adolf Hitler’s Nazi began its nightly bombing of the British capital.

Garvey died of a stroke in London in 1940. He was only 53, but white supremacy had broken and conquered him. 

During the 1790s, after the Haitian Revolution began in 1791, the most powerful man in the Caribbean was an African — Toussaint L’Ouverture. He defeated French, British and Spanish armies. He ruled Hispaniola.

Haiti had been a French colony called San Domingue. After Napoleon Bonaparte came to power in France in the late 1790s after the French Revolution of 1789 had caused the guillotining of French monarchs, he decided to send a French army led by his brother-in-law in 1802 to re-enslave the Haitian people. The great Toussaint was indecisive, and was imprisoned by the French. He was shipped to France, where he died, a defeated man, in a frigid French fortress.

The Haitian people, led by the ferocious Dessalines, fought off the French and declared an independent Black republic in 1804.

For different reasons, Toussaint is not remembered by the Caribbean masses. But Marcus Garvey has become a legend, a glorious myth, and the inspiration for a religion which has succeeded in overcoming the blue-eyed, blonde-haired Christ, an accomplishment which would have been considered impossible before him. But now, beloved, the “white lady” is the ruler. We children of Africa struggle to survive.

Maximum respect, Marcus Mosiah.