The Maya World is a place where my people, nature and time have found themselves in an area which is approximately 500,000 square kilometers. These people, my ancestors, started to be slaughtered by the Spaniards from around 1519. They took away our land and divided it into what we know today as Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras.
Before I continue, let me explain to those of you who, like myself, are learning: I am not a historian, I hold no title. I do my research among my people. As Belize, so are the rest of the countries which make up the Maya World: they also have their colonial apologists. Those that come from the Maya World and beyond to live in Belize, which is part of the Maya World, have always been doing so from ever since for the same reasons.
Sometime near the end of last year, I went to Guatemala and I took the opportunity to ask some questions to the black people who live in Puerto Barrios. My questions were simple: Would you like to live in Belize? Would you like to be a Belizean? The answer was always “NO.”
My following question was, why? Whatever they told me, I will stay with it. Nevertheless, I invite those of you who would like to know why the African descendants from Guatemala and Mexico would not like to be a Belizean. For some reasons, our so-called Creoles-Mulattos from Mexico and Guatemala do not like the Creoles-Mulattos-Kriols from Belize.
I invite our Belizean-intellectual-historians to come out of your closets and participate in the teaching of our history. I did not understand my mother when she sent me away. Today, I thank her for doing so, and I had the opportunity to tell her, “Thank you, Mama,” before she passed away.
My 40 years living in Mexico taught me about an educational system without the hypocrisy of the intervention of the conditional religious power. Sometime in the 1970s, Mexico took a national poll to see how many people read, what they were reading, and what they knew about their history. The results showed that very few people read a book per year, and the majority preferred an every week comic magazine. So the government decided to issue out comic magazines per week about their history at a very low cost. The important thing here was to educate the people.
If you look at the Mexican national flag and anthem, they are not glorifying the Spaniard conquistadores or the sons of the conquistadores. In the flag you will see an eagle holding a serpent with its beak and the claw of one leg, and with the other leg sustaining itself on a nopal tree. The Aztec High Priest “TENOCH” prophesied that whenever they found such sign the place will become their homeland and a great nation. And so it happened.
In my days, we were taught what the Spaniards, British, French, USA, etc. did to our people. And how great men with Bolas got up with my people, the indigenous, and fought against the imperial oppressors. Belize is the only country in the world whose people glorify their masters and show them that they are their masters, unconditional subjects who love their masters with “dog like devotion,” so much so that they plaster their slave likeness in their flag.
In 1798, slaves had no will. Slaves were slaves. In the 1790s, slaves were running away from their master looking for freedom because of ill treatment. The colonial apologists, the Royal Creoles who were tamed by force, have the belief that they willingly choose to defend their masters’ lives – “shoulder to shoulder.” The masters were on the Merlin well protected while the tamed slaves were on dories between the Spaniards and the Merlin. Slaves had no will, no right to choose.
The following is from the book “A History of Belize,” written by Narda Dobson, page 79. “The legal status of the settlement in the Bay of Honduras was not in any way affected by the battle of St George’s Cay. For many years it remained what it had long been – ‘a settlement, for certain purposes, in the possession and under the protection of His Majesty, but not within the territory and dominion of His Majesty.’ This phrase, from a Parliamentary Act of 1817, represents the attitude of the British Government to the Bay settlement for more than half a century. In legal terms, therefore, the Bay settlement was no more than a place where British subjects had a right to cut timber. The people who lived there were certainly regarded as British, but all sovereign rights and powers lay with Spain. Nowhere else in the British Empire was there such an anomalous situation. In Newfoundland, regarded for many years simply as a fishery, there were comparable difficulties of administration but without the same problem of a foreign sovereign power.
June 24, 2008
Finca Solana
Corozal Town