They can jump high, and they can jump low, but they can’t prove that the Battle of St. George’s Caye was a victory for a liberated Belize. It was a victory for a white supremacist Belize, not a liberated one. On September 10, 1798, Toussaint L’Ouverture’s Haiti was a liberated society. The settlement of Belize was a white supremacist settlement, not a liberated settlement. In the decades immediately after the Battle, black slaves in Belize were abused and mutilated, they were forbidden to beat their gombay drums, slaves rebellions continued, and the new Garifuna were forbidden to be in Belize Town after sundown.
It’s because generations of our people have insisted on fooling themselves and have insisted on allowing themselves to be fooled, that the situation presently exists in Belize where narco-Jacobins have arisen in the streets. Some of you say you were liberated in 1798, and others of you say you were liberated in 1981. What’s the difference? You play your home football games in Guatemala; you don’t even have a running track for your star children athletes; and you allow religious fanatics to teach your children mumbo jumbo. Then you pat yourself on the back and shout hip, hip, hurray.
This Belize is not a nation, Jack. It’s a colony. We worry about everybody outside of Belize, like the Lakers and the Celtics, and we don’t take care of our own. We throw filth on our streets, but we keep Chetumal’s clean as a whistle. Our leaders are “right honorable,” because they kneel in front of the Queen and kiss the Pope’s ring. You think the narco-Jacobins give a s— about that? You think you can keep the soldiers in the streets forever? What are you thinking, colonial?
A hard rain has already begun falling. The raindrops are bullets and the breeze is grenade shrapnel. The essence of the quandary is simple: the place ain’t liberated yet. It belongs to everybody else except us. We can’t even discipline our own children. And in the midst of this, you want us to cheer your long departed European ancestors and your nepotist “honorable” heroes? Come on.
We are not here to congratulate you, or to compromise with you. We are here to drive out ignorance and to disrespect colonialism. This was our mandate on August 13, 1969, and it remains our mandate on June 10, 2010. Apartheid is dead; communism has crumbled; a black man is president of the United States of America. But, in Belize, colonialism is stronger than it ever was. Real.
There will be a revolution. Not even Amandala will be safe from the revolution. Revolutions don’t have time to tell the difference between reactionaries and reformers. Revolutions are led by Jacobins, narco or otherwise.
You think if you went to the French oligarchy in 1789 before the storming of the Bastille, or to Porfirio’s Mexican ruling classes before the revolution began in 1910, or to the Czar before he and his family were slaughtered in 1917, if you went to any of them and you said, there will be a revolution: you think anybody would do anything except laugh at you? Ha, ha, ha.
Power to the people. Power in the struggle.