Children of 1798 and 1838
Posted: 30/07/2010 - 08:30 PM
Author:
August 1, they say, is Emancipation Day, and it is celebrated throughout the British Caribbean. This emancipation took place sometime between 1834 and 1838, but it was never celebrated much in the settlement of Belize, except early on.
The reason Emancipation Day was a bigger deal in the British Caribbean than in the settlement of Belize was because of two things. In the first instance, slaves in Belize could always flee to a form of freedom in the Yucatan, and, to a lesser extent, the Peten. And they were doing this all the time, causing a labor shortage for the Baymen slavemasters. Secondly, 1798 and the Battle of St. George’s Caye improved the status of black and colored people in Belize because it became clear then that the white Baymen could not defend the settlement without the support of the majority blacks and coloreds.
This newspaper’s understanding of Emancipation Day is that the British slavemasters had decided, following which they decreed, that those who had been slaves were thereby emancipated, or freed. In the case of emancipated Belizeans, free to go where? Independence from Spain in 1821 had meant that there were all kinds of violent conflicts going on in Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras in the 1830’s. And again, in the case of emancipated Belizeans, free to do what? All the jobs at the moment of emancipation were controlled by those who had been slavemasters, after which they became employers or bosses. The labor shortage of the eighteenth century was no more. The settlers/woodcutters/contractors could decide the wage scale. Emancipation, in short, did not mean much in Belize. And if it meant that much in the Caribbean, what was Marcus Mosiah fighting for and why did he get so much support eighty years after emancipation?
There had come this time, you see, when the slavemasters, as clever as they were, had decided that they no longer needed to shackle their human property with chains in order to control them. This was because the white rulers had reached the point of controlling the minds of black people. The descendants of those who had been kidnapped in West Africa no longer wanted to be free, in the real sense of the word, in Belize. In fact, it is doubtful whether we actually knew what was freedom in the 1830’s. For sure, emancipation was not freedom.
Some of our ancestors had apparently come to accept that what existed in Belize in the 1830’s was a kind of natural order of things – white at the top, black at the bottom, brown in between. And God save the Queen. Britannia rule the waves. Hip, hip, hurray.
Ever since emancipation, some of us have been fighting for improvement. On a whole, our people sought to train the young in marketable skills and to educate them in reading, writing and arithmetic. Our ancestors wanted their children to have a better, easier life than they did. Our ancestors believed that if they worked hard, some form of upliftment was possible within the system as they knew it, colonial as it was.
It is not easy, probably impossible, to pinpoint when exactly things began to fall apart for those whose ancestors had been working here in 1798 and 1838. What we can say with certainty now, however, is that things have fallen apart. This has been documented and established by the Dr. Herbert Gayle research team.
Some very powerful people here have spent the last 35 years trying to deny and bury UBAD and what it represented. We venture to say that if UBAD had survived and had its way, this collapse within the ranks of the 1798 and 1838 descendants would never have occurred. “If,” however, is a meaningless word in the dictionary, so what’s the use?
The facts have been presented in July of 2010 in such a way that no one can deny them. Our interpretation of these facts leads us to the conclusion that the leaders of the 1798 and 1838 descendants have made some serious mistakes over the last 60 years. The important thing is not who made the mistakes. In fact, many of these people are dead. The important thing is what were the mistakes, and what were the options which were rejected.
Any thinker or commentator who refuses to discuss the nature of those mistakes and what were the options rejected, is really an enemy of the people. The troubling thing is that those thinkers and commentators who are in the hire of Belize’s two major political parties have already given many indications that their world is strictly a red UDP or blue PUP reality. That, beloved, is exactly the blind reality which got us into this mess in the first place. Belize is bigger, much bigger than the UDP or the PUP as individual organizations. The time has come for us to begin to figure it out.
Power to the people. Power in the struggle.
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