“One (in)famous pardo pirate, Diego Lucifer de los Reyes el Mulato, terrorized the Yucatec coast in the 1640s, sacking Campeche and Bacalar in 1642 and inspiring a royal edict in 1643 that ordered ‘every possible remedy to be taken to capture the mulatto pirate.” But although Diego Lucifer’s gang was multinational and multiracial, there is no sign that he represented a refuge for disaffected black slaves or pardos; indeed one of his kidnapping victims during the assault on Bacalar was a fellow mulatto named Luis Fernandez.”
– pg. 183, THE BLACK MIDDLE: Africans, Mayas and Spaniards in Colonial Yucatan, by Matthew Restall, Stanford University Press, 2009
“ … so suffice to identify here three Afro-Yucatecan rural communities that were exceptional … These rural communities were San Fernando Ake, Kikil, and San Francisco de Paula.”
“San Fernando Ake was founded in 1796 by the colonial authorities as a settlement for Afro-Haitian soldiers who had fought for Spain in the wars over Sainte Domingue and Santo Domingo.”
– pg. 148, ibid.
“Baptism and burial records show that by the 1790s the communities of Kikil parish were over a fifth Afro-Yucatecan.”
“The third late colonial Afro-Yucatecan rural community was San Francisco de Paula. The archaeologists who recently located the ruins of this village (a team headed by Anthony Andrews) have suggested that San Francisco was founded by escaped slaves …”
– pg. 149, ibid.
During the four years I was chairman of the board of the University of Belize, there were many battles to be fought. Initially, I had gone to the University College of Belize (UCB) around October of 1999, and sought the chairmanship of the UCB Council as a replacement for Carlos Castillo, a well-known UDP educator and politician whose term of office had come to an end. I sought the UCB chairmanship in an attempt, I believed, to prevent the Roman Catholic establishment from taking over the national university. In other words, you may accuse me of going to UCB with an adversarial mentality.
But, a story goes with this. All my children with my wife were raised by their mother as Jehovah’s Witnesses. This is a religious organization which is controversial, in that they don’t believe in government and politics and a lot of things in which other people believe.
My third child with my wife, Rachael, attended All Saints Primary School, spent a year at Wesley College, then three more at St. Catherine Academy, from which she graduated. She then attended St. John’s College Sixth Form, from which she graduated. But her experiences there were such that I became convinced that there simply must be a secular, state alternative to the denominational institutions, which practice religious discrimination from time to time. It was then that I decided, in consultation with Dr. Leroy Taegar and Bill Lindo, that I would seek to be the replacement for Carlos Castillo at UCB.
My decision was supported, for whatever his reasons, by then Prime Minister Said Musa, and my campaign for chairmanship was conducted by Bill Lindo, who was already on the UCB board. I was very nervous, because I had sworn in December of 1977 that I would never again submit myself to any electoral process. But in order to become UCB Council chairman, I had to be elected. And, I was.
A few weeks after becoming UCB Council chairman, I found out about the Government of Belize’s University of Belize initiative, which would involve the amalgamation of five tertiary level institutions – UCB, Belize Teachers College, Belize Technical College, Bliss School of Nursing, and Belize School of Agriculture. Where that was concerned, adventure began to follow adventure. I had stepped into an ants’ nest.
But, more on that some other time. For today, I want to say that one of my accomplishments while UB chair was bringing the historian Ivan Van Sertima to Belize. Van Sertima was a tenured Professor at Rutgers University at the time. The educational establishment here, controlled by the clerics, could not question Van Sertima’s credentials. So, they essentially boycotted his visit, lectures, and tour. The UB faculty members cooperated with the Van Sertima visit, but remember, at the time the University of Belize did not even have a history department, much less an anthropology one. Amazing.
Today, I am saying to you educators of Belize that the recent research and writing done by Matthew Restall is extremely relevant to and important for Belize and Belizeans. Restall is Professor of Latin American History and Director of Latin American Studies at Pennsylvania State University.
The nature of the intellectual class in Belize has been isolationist and elitist. I understand why this is so. No intellectual wants to go through the hell which yours truly did challenging Belize’s educational status quo, buttressed as it is by dangerous and violent political power.
At the same time, the high level educators of Belize must, for their part, understand why I am passionate, yea angry, about certain things. I didn’t manufacture these data and arguments I have presented in this newspaper for over four decades. In the United States of America, the research on the Yucatan, because of the Caste War, has just exploded over the past three decades. The Yucatan and Belize are linked not only by land, river and sea. They are linked by a serious intermingling of DNA which has been taking place for centuries and which has had major social, historical, and even military implications.
They boast that there was a “peaceful, constructive revolution” which took place in Belize during my lifetime. I say to you one more time: that revolution did not take place in education. Belize education is reactionary, outdated and protective of imperialist myths. It’s time to get your act together, Belizean educators. Kick up some dust.
Power to the people. Power in the struggle.