For 40 years the Jesuits in Belize have been waging an undeclared war against Amandala, and their biggest issue is African and Mayan history.
Belize’s first Prime Minister, Rt. Hon. George Price, was a darling of the Jesuits. Under his rule, Landivar took over control of this country’s educational system between the 1950’s and 1960’s. When Mr. Price forged an alliance with Amandala in 1975, it was a case of his becoming desperate, because of pressure from the UDP. As soon as Mr. Price won the pre-independence general elections of 1979, that alliance was doomed.
The first UDP Prime Minister was another Landivar product, Rt. Hon. Manuel Esquivel, and the Jesuit hegemony remained in place. We noted with disappointed interest that during his term of office from 1984 to 1989, Dr. Esquivel did nothing to support the Belize Technical College, which had emerged as the leading challenger to St. John’s College during the 1970’s.
Campaigning for the 1998 general elections, Belize’s first Protestant Prime Minister, Hon. Said Musa, decided to endorse African and Mayan history in order to consolidate the PUP’s alliance with Kremandala.
Though the PUP won those elections by a landslide, the Jesuits showed their muscle by ensuring the African and Mayan history program did not get off the ground in Musa’s 1998-2003 term. Now, mind you, after 300 years of white supremacist brainwashing, the bourgeois class in Belize, which provides most of the teachers in the primary and secondary system, were willing allies of the Jesuits. The teachers did not believe the African and Mayan history, because they themselves had been taught only British and European history. They did not believe the African and Mayan hype, and they didn’t want to teach it.
In his second term of office, to his credit, Mr. Musa took on the African and Mayan history program himself, and practically forced it into the primary school curriculum as a pilot project. He had won two terms of office with the African and Mayan history in his campaign manifesto, so it was not as if the thing was an electoral burden.
The ruling UDP do not care for African and Mayan history. Under their new administration, the Jesuits and their instruments have seriously damaged the African and Mayan history program. This history is a controversial thing even in the Caribbean, because some of the ruling classes there are still neo-European. In the Roman Catholic Central American republics, African and Mayan history is positively anathema. It is not even mentioned.
Well now, the United States of America, the undoubted boss of the Western Hemisphere, has an African American president, and the scholars and academics of America have established, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it was the Egyptians who taught the Greeks, and that the Egyptians were black Africans. Insofar as Mayan history is concerned, the facts have been just as startling and enlightening where education and civilization are concerned.
The decision of the United States government to co-sponsor (with the UBAD Educational Foundation) this February’s Black History program in Belize, means that the Jesuits have lost this war. They will not concede; they will not yield; they will continue to fight. But, as it is said, the die is now cast. Game, set, and match. African and Mayan history will rule.
All power to the people