My argument in this column is that the middle classes, while their successes demand and deserve our respect, must understand that those of our people who have rejected the European emulation route, have justification for their rejection of the gods of their conquerors.

Now every morning in the United States, as I suppose in Great Britain, France, Germany and all the ruling European nations of the world, there are millions of men and women who go to work without any specific job or assignment. Yet they are some of the highest paid people in the world. They are Ph.D?s, professors and geniuses. What they do is something called research and development ? R & D.

If a society is poor, you cannot afford people to be dabbling in research and development. It is only the very rich nations in the world who can afford to pay these geniuses to create. Technological development, you see, is incremental. It is work on top of work, from generation to generation, from brain to brain. They say the first computer built, some 40, 50 years ago, was as big as a room. Now the technology has progressed to the point where you hold computers in the palm of your hand. Before the first computer, what you had were radio tubes; then they developed transistors. Then they began linking different technologies. They created the computer chip. The scientists and inventors and professors were sharing their knowledge, and one thing led to another. The first atomic bomb was dropped by the United States on Japan in 1945. But much of the technology came from German scientists. The same nuclear technology was being developed in Russia, Germany, Japan, etc. There was a race. Rome was not build in a day. A society cannot afford scientists and inventors and professors unless that society is rich.

And you must understand that Europe was deadly poor until 500 years ago! No one can deny that. Europe became rich by conquering and exploiting Africans and indigenous Americans, not to mention Asians like the Indians and the Chinese. The hard work of the non-white peoples of the earth produced the wealth for the Europeans which enabled them to finance the research and development which produced their technological successes.

The brains of the Europeans are not better, either by definition or by creation, than the brains of non-Europeans. Today, in fact, it is the same previously oppressed Indians, Chinese and other Asians who have become cutting edge where various modern technologies are concerned. It was never a matter of superior DNA ? it was always a matter of war and conquest. Straight like that.

Four thousand years ago, the best technology on planet earth was in Africa ? in Egypt, Nubia, Sudan and Ethiopia. A thousand years ago, the best technology in the Americas was in the societies of the Incas, the Mayas, the Olmecs, the Aztecs, and so on and so forth.

I never disrespect the Europeans. I would be a fool to do a thing like that. What I fight against is ignorance among my own people. Our middle classes have a way of looking down upon our lower classes, considering them to be failures and discredits to the race. I am saying that our lower classes, for different reasons, chose to reject the European way of life, because they believed that they would destroy themselves if they emulated those who had conquered, raped, murdered, and oppressed them.

I can?t say that I know that the middle classes were wrong and the lower classes were right. I am saying that the different classes of our people should be working with each other, and should know that they have reason to respect each other. When there were slave rebellions in the American South in the nineteenth century, it was field slaves working along with house slaves. The house slaves had the inside scoop on Massa, and the field slaves provided the hostile energy.

In Belize, I?m tired of the supercilious and contemptuous attitude of our middle classes. They don?t have any more brains than our lower classes. Belize Technical College proved that. The white man is not smarter than the black man. You don?t have to force your child to imitate the European. We have our own traditional values. Science and technology do not belong to the European. We paid for it with the labour of our ancestors. Get the sense.

Power to the people.