The Maya in modern Belize

(Posted: 06/05/08) In the early 1960’s, the PUP Leader, Hon. George Cadle Price, began talking about the Mayan past of Belize. He referred to that past repeatedly in his speeches during the 1960’s, seemingly in an attempt to create some kind of historical legitimacy, before the time of the European buccaneers who became woodcutters in Belize and then gave way to British colonialism, for his Independence movement.

“The history of the American continent does not begin with Christopher Columbus, or even with Leif the Lucky, but with those Maya scribes in the Central American jungles who first began to record the deeds of their rulers some two thousand years ago. Of all the peoples of the pre-Columbian New World, only the ancient Maya had a complete script: they could write down anything they wanted to, in their own language.”

- pg. 7, BREAKING THE MAYA CODE (Revised Edition), by Michael D. Coe, Thames & Hudson Inc., 1999

In the early 1960’s, the PUP Leader, Hon. George Cadle Price, began talking about the Mayan past of Belize. He referred to that past repeatedly in his speeches during the 1960’s, seemingly in an attempt to create some kind of historical legitimacy, before the time of the European buccaneers who became woodcutters in Belize and then gave way to British colonialism, for his Independence movement.

The vast majority of Belizeans, most of whom were literate and considered themselves educated, knew absolutely nothing about the Maya. Perhaps they had an excuse then, but they have none now. Academic knowledge of the Maya – their empires, sites, arts, languages, etc., has grown exponentially in the five decades since Mr. Price took over leadership of the PUP.

In those days, days when Mr. Price’s power was massive and intimidating, Belize’s educational system was at a critical point where the Roman Catholic priests and nuns, whom Mr. Price supported, were taking over the education of Belizeans where both quantity and quality were concerned.

Education in British Honduras in the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, controlled by the British, had not included the Maya past or present, and essentially that situation remained the same in Belize in the second half of the twentieth century under the Romans.

The revolutionary public criticism of the PUP which was initiated by UBAD in early 1969, included the question of what role young “Africans” would play in Mr. Price’s “Mayan” Belize. Mr. Price’s brilliance as a politician came to the fore six years later when he included a UBAD faction in his drive towards Independence. What we mean is that Premier Price’s most dangerous enemy between 1969 and 1972 had been UBAD, arguably, but Mr. Price apparently decided in 1975 that he needed to have some of the “African” energy on his side.

UBAD president Evan X Hyde’s criticism of Belize’s Catholic-dominated educational system where its lack of an African and Mayan component was concerned, placed him in the crosshairs of the Roman clergy. It was easy for the clergy to lump UBAD’s criticism of Catholic schools’ curricula with a blanket attack on the sacred dogmas. Over a period of a hundred years, the Catholic clergy in Belize had integrated their education with their dogmas to the point where they could make them inseparable for the faithful. In other words, an attack on one, was an attack on both.

And the Catholics got away with this, because the British had had fundamentally the same position where Africans and Mayans were concerned – they were pagans and barbarians. To this day, the education system in Belize refuses to recognize that it was the Europeans who invaded Africa and America five hundred years ago who were the real barbarians. To do so would be to suggest that the religion of Christianity established by the European barbarians in Africa and America, was somehow imperfect.

On the political ground in the 1960’s, Mr. Price’s actions were different from his rhetoric. Specifically, Mr. Price’s 1964 ouster of Jesus Ken from his Corozal South PUP stronghold was a decision to discipline the North’s most militant and powerful Mayan leader in order to appease the British - Tate and Lyle. Mr. Price was talking Maya, but the game he played after 1957 was a British game.

The point we wish to make in this essay is that we will watch many thousands of Belizeans graduate from school in the next few weeks. They will graduate from primary school, high school, junior college, and university. But their education would have been critically flawed by their relative ignorance of the Maya people who were the original owners of this land, who built great civilizations while the British, for their part, were warring barbarian tribes, and whose descendants say very little publicly but will have a decisive role to play where the future of Belize is concerned.

Ignorance in the service of religious fanaticism is a serious Achilles heel in modern Belize. Those Belizeans who consider themselves educated because they will graduate from schools here, are mentally crippled because they have been taught almost nothing about the Maya. The modern Maya have never sought to impose their consciousness upon the arrogant Giao. Our thesis is that it is the Giao who would be best served by learning all they can about the Maya people. The reality is that the Maya owned this place, and, if only because of that legacy, their position in modern Belize must be an honorable one.

There are opinionated Giao “leaders” and “thinkers” about who are ignorant about the Maya. Sometimes we laugh when we see them write and hear them speak on Belizean matters with a manifest ignorance of the Maya. But really, instead of laughing, we should cry. It is sad to see your “educated” colleagues pontificate because they have been convinced by the clergy that they are “qualified.” The fact of the matter is that if you don’t know about the Maya, then when you talk about Belize, you are talking in ignorance. And ignorance, even if it is cloaked in the garb of ethnic or nationalist patriotism, must always be condemned. So let it be written, so let it be done.