by Marie-Therese Belisle Nweke
Friday, April 5, 2024
Canada is a huge, sparsely populated nation, thanks to its almost inhuman climate; and for some time has been hugely welcoming to immigrants from wherever. It now has one of the largest African, West Indian and Indian Diasporas, as well as a growing Muslim one.
Recently, I was viewing via my iPad the funeral service in Canada of Mr. Leroy Grant. He was my Geography teacher at Wesley College. The wife of the highly respected lawyer, the late Mr. Horace Young, is his elder sister. It was indeed a very Belizean event, despite the white minister presiding, with the Rev. C. David Goff of the Methodist Church in Belize speaking most eloquently via a video connection. Then, there was the rounding up of the ceremony with the evocative playing of the Wesley College song – “Lift up your hearts”/ “Sursum Corda”.
Some months before that funeral, I was watching the requiem service in Florida, again via my iPad, for Barbara Sedasey Balderamos’s late mother, Mrs. Joyce Waite Sedasey. I grew up with Barbara right through our years at Wesley Primary School and Wesley College. Unfortunately, we lost touch with each other when she precipitously dropped out of school around the time of the apparent breakup of her parents’ marriage and her mother’s emigration to America.
While viewing these funerals, I ruminated over the growing numbers of Belize’s people, particularly its Creole ethnic group, being buried or cremated in Canada and the US, and their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren sounding all “Americana” at these funeral services, as the difference between both accents (Canadian and American) is minimal.
See what’s happening now in the former welcoming Canada! I clearly foresee a time, which is definitely coming, when it‘ll be far better for some people, especially Black people, to just keep their backsides at home. You and I may not be around when it happens, but it shall surely come… Was it not the great “Zik of Africa” – Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe — who said: “No condition is permanent”?