by Peter Ashdown

     The pre-devaluation history of modern Belize is the history of the development and dominance of a Creole society. While other ethnic groups may have inhabited the land area of the country and figured in the census rolls, they were, in the words of Dr. Grant, ” … in the colonial society but not OF it.”

    For all practical purposes, until the political awakening of December 1949, the local politics and economics of the Colony were made and manipulated in the capital, and the capital was Creole and elitist. The values and attitudes of the Creole “aristocratic” families” with whom the Colonial Government shared power were the forces which dictated not only the Colony’s constitutional and economic progress, but also the Colony’s vision of its own history. That vision, understandably, was one which equated the history of the Colony with the history of the development of the Creole majority and particularly with the history of the privileged class within that group.

THE TRADITIONAL HISTORY

     It was traditionally a glorious history. It originated with the British logwood cutters and their slaves who had successfully beaten back the might of Imperial Spain in 1798. The victory at St. George’s Caye, it was held, was only made possible because of the unity of purpose between master and slave — a unity which was unique because “slavery hardly existed in the Settlement.” It existed to the degree that emancipation was necessary in 1834, but this too was hailed as a triumph of British liberalism, for it bound black and white together in their devotion to the British throne: a coming together, manifested in the steady creolization of the population after 1838 as intermarriage between the descendants of the old Baymen and those of the free-coloured and ex-coloured and ex-slaves, became more frequent. Between the end of the apprenticeship and the 1880s, a Creole society had come into being.     

    It was a society which venerated the European genes in its composition. The mother country was the master of the world and the Creole, of all the disparate groups of the Colony, was the most closely linked with the master race. The elitist sons of that race came from the mother country to administer the Empire’s only Central American colony and the Creole aristocracy was on hand to aid them in so doing. 

    Colonial administrator and Creole aristocrat fed off each other in a community of interest. The one sought to divide and rule by being a separate, privileged class over the inarticulate labour force: the other sought to imitate the overlord’s culture and to retain its stranglehold over the Colony’s economy and labour by a show of deference to the Imperial power. In such a way both the loyalty of the Colony to the Empire was retained, and the Creole elite’s capture of the Colony’s wealth and institutions were preserved and entrenched. 

    This symbiosis was nurtured not only by the mythology and romance of the past but by continuous contact, blood sacrifice and the aspiration of imperial award. The Creole elite sent its sons to walk in the fair meadows of the Cam and the Cherwell, and encouraged them to regard Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh and London as their spiritual homes. For not only did the sons of Empire live to protect those fields and cities, but they died also in Picardy and Flanders and in the Battle of Britain, and were buried in foreign but not alien soils far from the yards they had known as children.

    For the survivors, the hope of an imperial decoration was the crowning achievement. In war as in peace, the honours of Empire were as much a part of the Creole elite’s aspiration as was the accumulation of wealth in commerce or in the professions. 

    The commitment to the Empire and the British throne by this privileged class was sincerely held and the rewards sincerely attained, but it could only last while the psychology of Empire lasted. With the attack on imperialism and colonialism after 1945, the Creole elite was faced with a crisis of conscience. The new political forces were not only anti-imperialist but anti-British. It was no longer just the pin-pricks of carping at the lethargy of constitutional change and at economic development, but an attack on the very foundations and fundamentals of the belief in the British way of life. In being so, it was just as much an onslaught on the Creole aristocracy as it was on the British administration, and in the ensuing conflict the privileged class had no choice but to align itself with the old order and against the forces of “treason” and “revolution” which sought to topple the king and sweep away his court and favourites as well. 

    The outcome of the struggle was never in question, because a new world order was in the making, but apart from the political crisis of 1949-54, which was the manifestation of the Belizean experience of that trauma, there arose and still arises the problem of the redefinition of Belize’s history. 

    (from pgs. 142, 143 of READINGS IN BELIZEAN HISTORY (Second Edition), published by Belizean Studies, St. John’s College, Box 548, Belize City, May 1987)