From The Publisher
Posted: 27/07/2010 - 10:34 AM
Author: Evan X Hyde
“In 1967, a member of this group, Dean Lindo, a lawyer and one of three deputy leaders of the party, claimed to have contemplated contesting the leadership of the NIP in that year but deferred to Goldson in the interest of party unity, rather than in the belief that the latter would eventually be able to take the NIP out of the electoral doldrums by concentrating on the Guatemala issue. It is possible that Lindo refrained from making the move at the time because had he succeeded, the party would have been put in the anomalous situation of having its new Leader outside the House of Representatives and the old inside it. In view of these considerations, the question which arises is, why did Lindo challenge Goldson at the annual party conference two years later in October 1969, and risk the party unity for which he claimed to be concerned, especially as this meeting was expected to be the last before the approaching general election?”
- pg. 269, THE MAKING OF MODERN BELIZE, Cedric H. Grant, Cambridge University Press, 1976
“It was probably the prospect of UBAD becoming a political party, which it had ‘reserved the right to do,’ after it eventually merged with PAC into ‘one national liberation movement’ called the Revolitical Action Movement (RAM) in October 1969, that finally prompted Lindo to end the delay of his bid for the NIP leadership.”
- pg. 270, ibid.
On Sunday, August 1, 2010, the ruling United Democratic Party (UDP) will hold a national convention in Orange Walk Town, and then in September the UDP will celebrate its 37th anniversary. This newspaper will mark the 41st anniversary of its establishment on August 13, 2010, and there is a story here for you to analyze.
This newspaper began within six months of the foundation of an organization called the United Black Association for Development (UBAD). When UBAD began, the then ruling People’s United Party (PUP), led by the Hon. George Price, was just 19 years old, and the UDP did not exist. The Opposition Party in 1969 was the National Independence Party (NIP), led by the Hon. Philip Goldson.
Compared to the PUP and the NIP, the UBAD was a young group. When I became UBAD president in early 1969, I was only 21 years old, and our members and supporters were generally younger than the members and supporters of the two major political parties.
Looking back, we can see that the PUP began in 1950 as a party of labor, which has become a party of capital over the last 25 years. The PUP was built on the foundation of the General Workers Union (GWU). Today, the PUP is controlled by multimillionaire capitalists who like to call themselves “investors.”
The history of the UDP is more complex. In 1951, a National Party (NP) was organized in reaction to the rise of the anti-colonial PUP. Compared to the PUP, the NP was a party of property and privilege. It was considered pro-British. In 1958, the NP joined with Philip Goldson’s Honduran Independence Party (HIP), and thus the National Independence Party (NIP) was born.
Philip Goldson had been one of the founders and leaders of the PUP in 1950, so his views were more “roots” than those of the NP stalwarts. Philip, along with Leigh Richardson, had been ousted from PUP leadership in 1956, whereupon they founded the HIP in 1957. At some point soon after, Leigh Richardson decided to go into exile in Trinidad.
The first Leader of the NIP had been the NP Leader, Herbert Fuller. Philip Goldson dedicated himself to publishing and editing The Belize Billboard, a daily which was the colony’s leading newspaper. Mr. Goldson did not become NIP Leader until Mr. Fuller became sick and died, sometime late in 1961 or early 1962. In fact, Philip was so divided, so to speak, between the Billboard and the NIP, that he did not even run as a candidate in the March 1961 general elections, the first ever held under the present Ministerial constitution.
(Incidentally, in 1961, “The PUP took the view that since it had won all of the seats there was no parliamentary opposition, although the defeated parties, the NIP and CDP, had chosen Goldson … as their nominee to the Legislative Assembly.” The preceding quote is from Grant, pg. 243. The “CDP” was Belize’s first Christian Democratic Party, led by Nicholas Pollard, Sr.)
UBAD was a black-conscious organization with a leadership of diverse views. At foundation in February of 1969, the UBAD leadership included two followers of the Hon. Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam (Charles X Eagan and Ismail Shabazz), a Malcolm X disciple (myself), Belize’s first Rastafarian (Robert Livingston), Belize’s leading painter (Denzel “Bee-lisle” Belisle), and Belize’s leading black businessman (Wilhelm Arnold, Sr.) Arnold soon resigned, Belisle drifted away, and Livingston migrated to New York City in September of 1969.
In retrospect, UBAD’s sudden and sensational rise to popularity and prominence in the summer of 1969 had something to do with dissatisfaction within the urban black population, which was a majority population at the time. Mr. Goldson’s NIP had focused on the Guatemalan claim as the no. 1 threat to Belize, and, by logical extension, to Belize’s majority black population. But, in the summer of 1969, UBAD was definitely not NIP, and in fact had a public confrontation and fight with an NIP organization, the CIVIC, in August of 1969.
Cedric Grant has written that Dean Lindo challenged Philip Goldson for NIP leadership in October of 1969. I cannot understand how the Ph.D. scholar could have made such an egregious mistake. Lindo began his Beacon newspaper in August of 1969, after he had challenged Goldson for NIP leadership and lost. The NIP national convention in which that challenge took place would have been around May or June of 1969. There is no way the convention could have taken place as late as October. Lindo set up the People’s Development Movement (PDM) after his unsuccessful challenge and began the Beacon (now defunct) to publish his views.
It is clear now that there was a campaign to overthrow Goldson which went into gear in the spring/summer of 1969. That campaign was only temporarily sidetracked when Mr. Price announced general elections in November of 1969. The NIP and the PDM hurriedly formed a coalition for those elections, held in December of 1969. When they lost to the PUP, winning only Goldson’s Albert seat out of the 18 constituencies, the so-called NIPDM immediately separated into its component parts.
By October of 1971, Mr. Goldson must have been seeing the political handwriting on the wall. His NIP coalition with UBAD for the December 1971 Belize City Council elections now has to be considered an act of desperation on his part. Lindo’s PDM boycotted these elections, and in early 1972, after Mr. Goldson flew to London to begin studying law, Lindo emerged as a defence counsel for UBAD’s leaders.
At its birth as the Unity Congress in early 1973, the UDP essentially divided the UBAD executive, a division which led to UBAD’s dissolution in late 1974. The question the UBAD survivors have to ask themselves, in light of what has happened to the black community since the coming of the UDP and the end of UBAD, is what has been the UDP role in all the changes which have taken place over the last 37 years. We don’t need to get into personalities in discussing such a question. There are some unpleasant facts which are staring us in the face in the summer of 2010.
Power to the people. Power in the struggle.
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