When my class began high school at St. John’s College in 1959, Belize was still British Honduras, and we who lived here were “British subjects.” The history we studied in preparation for Cambridge “Ordinary Level” examinations was, as you might have expected, British history.
On entering Dartmouth College six years later, I met a student from Malawi whose name was Guy Christopher Zimema Mhone. He was four years older than I, but his educational history had been exactly the same as mine, insofar as “O” Levels and Sixth Form were concerned. Malawi, you see, had been a British colony (by the name of “Nyasaland,” I believe).
Guy Mhone, who had become one of Africa’s most famous economists by the time of his death four years ago, had been through dangerous stuff as a young man. He had been involved in student agitation against the Malawi dictator, Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda, who had committed Malawi to collaboration with the apartheid regimes in the republic of South Africa, which is just south of Malawi. Guy Mhone would become one of my most important teachers, and I will honor him until I die.
Anyway, this British history which the imperialists of Albion were teaching to children in their colonies all over planet earth, featured the bitter and bloody sixteenth century conflicts between England and Spain. These conflicts, born of competition for hegemony in Europe and the newly “discovered” territories of Africa and America, took on a religious aspect in the latter part of the 1520’s, when the English king, Henry VIII, broke away from the Pope’s Holy Roman Church and declared himself head of a new Anglican Church.
When Henry’s daughter, Elizabeth I, became Queen of England in 1558, the invasion exploits of conquistadores like Cortes in Mexico and Pizarro in Peru had enriched Catholic Spain immensely. The English produced pirates who would attack Spanish treasure galleons as soon as they left Central and South American ports for the voyage across the Atlantic. Elizabeth encouraged these pirates, such as John Hawkins, Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh. She was, in effect, waging guerrilla war on the high seas. (French and Dutch pirates were also attacking Spanish ships.)
By 1588, the Spanish king, Philip II, had had enough of Elizabeth and her “sea dogs,” so he prepared a mighty armada to invade England. The Spanish ships were huge but slow, the English ones small but swift. The English sailed rings around the Spanish Armada, and England was saved.
Because of this history of conflict between Catholic Spain and Anglican England in which I was schooled, it has always puzzled me how the British in Belize, absolute masters of the settlement after 1798, allowed the Catholics to become dominant in the colony’s educational system.
When I began high school in 1959, St. Michael’s College (Anglican) and Wesley College (Methodist) were still very good, but you could see that, overall, the Catholics were beginning to take over education.
It is true that the Garifuna teachers whom the Catholics began to rely on early in the twentieth century, contributed enormously to the Roman surge here, but still, the Anglican British colonial masters could have done any of a number of things to frustrate the Catholics.
A few weeks ago, one of my prized sources and teachers dropped this one on me. He said that up until 1936, all the Jesuits who ran the Catholic education system in Belize were British, and it was only afterwards that American Jesuits from St. Louis, Missouri, became the decision makers for the Catholic schools. Almost all of these American Jesuits, you should know, came from German and Irish families which had migrated to America. The Germans and the Irish are traditional opponents of the British.
For me, the suggestion is that in the first part of the twentieth century the British in Belize were not all that concerned about the Catholic school system because all the Jesuits were British. By 1939, there was a world war in which German airplanes were bombing London. When that war, which weakened Britain on the world stage, ended in 1945, nationalist and anti-colonialist movements began to form in British colonies worldwide. Belize was no exception. The nationalist movement here was encouraged and advised by American Jesuits, who had become popular with the Belizean people because of, among other things, their credit unions, Golden Gloves boxing tournaments, and basketball competitions.
In the Western Hemisphere, the British and the Americans are such good friends that it doesn’t matter which one of them runs the Belize school system, so long as it remains white supremacist. The thing is that the role of the British in the Guatemala claim issue is always important for us to analyze, because the British, supposedly our good friends, supported the Seventeen Proposals (1968) and the Heads of Agreement (1981). Yet, many Belizeans still swear by the British.
In 2010, Britain now supports Belize’s going to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the Netherlands for a Guatemala claim decision. Belizeans, for sure we have to sleep “wid wi own eye.” In the words of Jesse Jackson, we might have come here in different ships, but now we’re all in the same boat. The British cut us loose 29 years ago. Stand firm, Belizeans.
Power to the people. Power in the struggle.