Belizeans are a Christian people in the vast majority. This is to say, that while our people accept the fact that all of us have “sinned and fallen short of the glory,” we rely on the New Testament Gospel of John which declares in verse 16 of Chapter 3, that God so loved the world that He gave his only-begotten Son to be crucified in order that we human beings would be saved from our sins.

There are many other religions in the world which are not Christian. The most prominent is Islam, whose adherents do not believe in the Triune God of Christianity. In other words, Muslims do not believe that God has a Son or that there is a Holy Spirit: they believe there is only one God — Allah.

Some Christians believe that humanity is only 6,000 years old, but there are many people, especially scientists, who believe that humanity is hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of years old.

Whatever the case, the fact of the matter is that Christianity itself is only two thousand years old, since Christianity began with the birth of Jesus Christ, the supposed Son of God, about two thousand years ago. So then, before the birth of Christ, everybody on earth was pagan, so to speak.

The ancestors of most Belizeans were Africans and Mayans, who lived thousands of years before the birth of Christ, and had their own religions.

The continent of Europe was inhabited by pagan tribes at the same time that our ancestors lived in Africa and America. Some say that Europe began to believe in Christianity around the third century A.D. or so. Whatever the case, when the Europeans, beginning with the Portuguese and the Spanish, followed by the British, the French, and the Dutch, began to sail south to Africa and west to America more than five hundred years ago, they brought Christianity with them in the form of priests and missionaries; but their conquest of Africa and America (and Asia) was not by means of religious teachings, but through the use of violence — guns and swords and horses.

After our ancestors were conquered, the conquering Christian Europeans eventually opened schools to teach our ancestors their Christian religions and European cultures.

Over the course of the five and more centuries to which I have referred, the histories of our African and Mayan ancestors were essentially obliterated. Our ancestors were enslaved, colonized, and brainwashed.

It was therefore totally ambitious on the part of yours truly to believe that the Christian European schools of today would agree to study and teach the pre-slavery and pre-colonialism histories of our African and Mayan people.

I think of this foolish ambition on my part as we prepare to mark the 56th anniversary of the founding of the United Black Association for Development (UBAD) on February 9, 1969.

Youth is known for its daring, so this is my excuse for thinking six decades ago that we would be allowed to learn what took place in Africa and America before the Europeans brought their guns and swords and horses and said to our ancestors: accept our blonde-haired, blue-eyed Christ, or die.