Belize

Source:

 Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition

Belize

Country in northeastern Central America, bordered by Mexico to the north, by Guatemala to the west and south, and by the Caribbean Sea to the east.

Before independence, the version of Belizean history taught in schools reflected the country's colonial status and the conservative Eurocentric views of the various Christian churches (Catholic, Anglican, and Methodist) that controlled most schools. The indigenous people of the region, the Maya, were mentioned chiefly in terms of their ancient civilization and archaeological ruins and their struggles with Spanish conquistadores in the sixteenth century. The history of Belize was depicted as beginning with English buccaneers (seafaring freebooters who preyed on Spanish ships), who in the 1630s began to cut logwood, from which a valuable dye was produced, from a base near the mouth of the Belize River.

The official version of events scarcely mentioned the thousands of enslaved Africans who were brought to the British settlement in the eighteenth century to cut logwood and, later, mahogany for England's luxury furniture industry. Masters and slaves were said to have lived and worked together, and even to have fought together in defeating the Spanish in the Battle of Saint George's Cay in 1798. A school text minimized slavery, claiming it was “never the callous, brutal system that it was in the [West Indies]” and emphasizing that the slaves were freed in 1834 by a benevolent Act of Emancipation, passed by the British Parliament in 1833. No explanation was offered for why “many of those who had been set free went on working as woodcutters.”

Until the 1980s no mention was made of the influence of Jamaican activist Marcus Garvey in the first half of the twentieth century, the struggle of working people to create trade unions, or the origins of the first political party in the first trade union. The history books portrayed democratic changes simply as resulting from reforms announced by the British government that would lead eventually to the granting of independence. In the 1980s new texts sponsored by the Ministry of Education revised the histories to provide a more realistic interpretation of colonization, slavery, cultural diversity, and the people's struggle for freedom. These texts reflect and contribute to a debate in Belize about the history and significance of slavery, race, and ethnic relations.

The Native American Presence and Colonial Belize

Before Europeans arrived in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the area of present-day Belize was inhabited by the Maya, whose civilization also extended over what are now southern Mexico, western Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala. The Classic period of the Maya civilization was between 300 and 900 c.e., but sites dating from about 1200 b.c.e. have been identified in Belize. Thousands of Maya still lived in the area when Spanish expeditions passed through at various times in the sixteenth century, beginning as early as 1508. Early in the seventeenth century, Spanish missionaries established churches in Maya towns in the area. The Maya were soon decimated by enslavement and by epidemics of European-introduced diseases. This holocaust severely depopulated the region, and many of the surviving Maya retreated into the forested interior.

Belize

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The area of present-day Belize was of only marginal importance to the Spanish Empire and England (part of Great Britain beginning in 1707). Although Spanish colonizers sought to conquer and convert the Maya in Belize, they never established a permanent settlement in the area. In the 1630s English settlements consisted of small temporary camps along the coast of the Bay of Honduras. By the 1790s the English had established a settlement of about 3,000 people at the mouth of the Belize River. The Convention of London (1786) gave British settlers rights to cut and export logwood and mahogany in the territory stretching from the Sibún River in the south to the Hondo River in the north, while it acknowledged Spanish sovereignty in the area. Spain made no further attempt to control the Belize area after local British settlers defeated the Spanish at the Battle of Saint George's Cay in 1798. However, treaties with Spain officially prohibited British settlers from developing plantation agriculture in the area.

Belize City market on Haulover Creek, where fishing is an important economic activity.

Peter Chartrand/DDB Stock Photo

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Shortly after Guatemala gained independence from Spain in 1821, Britain laid claim to the territory and in 1854 the settlement's first constitution was promulgated. In 1859 Britain signed a treaty with Guatemala that delineated the borders of Belize, and in 1862 Britain declared the territory a British colony, with the name of British Honduras. Yet, during the following year a dispute arose over the terms of the treaty when Britain failed to build a road from British Honduras to Guatemala. The construction of the road had originally been stipulated to recompense Guatemala for its loss of territory. From that point on, Guatemala questioned the legitimacy of Britain's sovereign claim.

Slavery in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Lacking indigenous laborers, British settlers in Belize imported enslaved Africans to work in their expanded woodcutting operations in the eighteenth century. Several thousand enslaved Africans were brought to Belize during the century via slave markets in the West Indies. The earliest reference to slaves in Belize is from the year 1724, but some slaves probably arrived before then. In 1787 many came with British settlers who relocated to the area after evacuating the Mosquito Coast (the coastal lowlands of present-day Nicaragua) under the terms of the Convention of London. More than three-quarters of the 2,214 people who came from the Mosquito Coast were slaves.

The 1790 census suggests the slaves came from the Congo region, present-day Angola, present-day Guinea, present-day Nigeria, and other parts of West Africa, but these identifications are unreliable. In 1823 there were about 1,500 African-born slaves in a slave population of about 2,500; most of the remainder were Creoles (in Belize, “Creole” refers to locally born people of largely African descent). After the British slave trade ended in 1808, only about 500 more Africans landed in Belize, most of them liberated from Spanish slave ships, so the proportion of Creoles in the population increased. The Igbo may have been particularly numerous, as part of Belize City was known as Eboe Town in the first half of the nineteenth century. Some other ethnic identifications persisted as well: According to an 1850 account there were “Congoes, Nangoes, Mongolas, Ashantees, Eboes, and other African tribes” in Belize.

The slave population showed a negative rate of reproduction because men outnumbered women by three to one, and the mortality rate was high due to malnutrition, disease, overwork, and abuse. Slave labor was more segregated by sex than in most plantation societies because most men were woodcutters and women worked in town as domestic slaves. The men lived most of the year in logging camps in the remote interior, joining the women and children only during the Christmas season. This pattern affected the ways that slaves in Belize responded to and resisted their enslavement, as well as the development of Creole culture. Many male slaves escaped from their working locations in the interior by going through the forests into bordering Spanish territory, the viceroyalty of New Spain. There the Spanish offered them asylum, hoping to undermine the British presence by sapping the labor force. Enslaved women and children had little chance of escape, being restricted to the town.

As long as men could escape, rebellion was a more risky alternative. However, slave revolts occurred in 1765, 1768, 1773, and 1820, and some escaped slaves created maroon communities on the fringes of the colonial settlement. The 1773 revolt, which lasted for five months, ended with the surviving slaves forcing their way across the northern border into what is now Mexico. The maroon communities sometimes communicated with the slaves, and in 1820 one of them provided refuge for rebels on the run, but they were never a base for protracted guerrilla action against the colonial settlement. When the neighboring territories became independent from Spain in 1821, they abolished slavery, and the British complained that many slaves were escaping to find freedom across the border. Through escape, maroonage, and slave revolts, hundreds of Africans and Creoles in Belize resisted slavery and undermined British power.

Black Rights and Emancipation

Manumission laws allowed many slaves to purchase their own freedom, to have their emancipation purchased by relatives and friends, or to be freed by the gift or bequest of their owners. In about 1800 the 3,000 slaves in the British settlement of Belize represented 75 percent of the population; by 1832 there were 2,000 slaves (62 percent male), constituting about 47 percent of the population. Another 47 percent of the population was made up of free people of color, including 969 free coloureds (a Belizean term for people of mixed African and European descent) and 819 free blacks.

Free people of color (including both free blacks and free coloureds) did not have equal rights with whites and generally were poor, though some were slave owners. After 1808 free coloureds were allowed to vote in the Public Meeting (a loosely structured administration that prevailed until more formal government institutions were established in 1854), but eligibility requirements were far more stringent for them than for whites who applied to vote. Free coloureds were required to prove a five-year local residency, in contrast to just one year for whites, and to possess visible property worth twice that required of white voters. Although free coloureds were expected to join the militia, they could not become commissioned officers, nor could they become jurors or magistrates. Some campaigned for the same rights and privileges as whites by claiming they were culturally and physically “white” and by emphasizing their loyalty and adherence to Britain. Under pressure from Britain, free coloureds, but not free blacks, were granted civil rights in Belize on July 5, 1831.

In 1833 British Parliament passed the Act of Emancipation, which formally ended slavery in Belize and throughout the British colonies. The law, which took effect in Belize on August 1, 1834, merely replaced slavery with another coercive system, called Apprenticeship. This system required “freed” slaves to continue working for their former owners without remuneration. The program was discarded in 1838, at which time all slaves were fully emancipated. The Act of Emancipation compensated slave owners for their loss of property but did not compensate the freed slaves for their years of unremunerated labor. They remained poor, landless, and dependent on working for their former owners, who monopolized the land. Crown land, which had been freely granted to the early white settlers before 1838, was priced out of the reach of former slaves because it was thought that their access to land and an independent livelihood might “discourage labor for wages.”

The white colonists who had owned most of the slaves also held most of the land, and controlled the political and judicial system in the form of the Public Meeting and the Magistracy. They continued to control their former slaves by denying them access to land and by developing a system amounting to debt servitude. Woodcutters were given advances on their wages when they signed contracts at the beginning of the logging season, but they often spent these advances during the Christmas holiday. Workers then had to purchase their supplies on credit at exorbitant prices from their employers' stores at the logging camps. Consequently they often ended the season indebted to their employer and therefore had no choice but to work for the same employer the next season. The colony's handbook admitted in 1888, a full fifty years after legal emancipation, that workers “thus become virtually enslaved for life.” This system was still widespread in the 1930s.

The mahogany trade declined in the 1850s, stagnating the economy. Afro-Belizeans, who were almost entirely Creole by the end of the nineteenth century, were dependent on wage labor that was intermittent and paid poorly. Most of them, effectively denied access to land, remained in or near Belize City, which was the center of Creole culture and the Creole community, as it is today.

Cultural Currents in Colonial Belize

Throughout the period of slavery, Afro-Belizeans had little contact with the Maya because the latter drew back from the frontier of temporary logging camps. Beginning in 1848, thousands of Maya and mestizos (people of mixed indigenous and European descent) migrated into Belize from neighboring Mexico and Guatemala as a result of civil war and oppression. Even then, these groups had little contact with Afro-Belizeans because the new immigrants settled in rural areas in the north, west, and south, away from the area around Belize City. While there was no legal segregation, a pattern of economic and residential segregation persisted until contact between the various ethnic groups developed in the 1950s and 1960s through participation in national political and educational systems.

The British continued to dominate the economic, administrative, legal, and educational institutions. However, the Creoles strongly influenced other aspects of the culture, including language, folktales and proverbs, music and dance, religion, and recreation. At Christmastime, in particular, there was a street festival of music, songs, dances, feasting, and boat races on the Belize River. In these ways the Christmas season was an opportunity for a culturally heterogeneous population to express diverse traditions, to observe and learn from those of others, and to create new, distinctly Belizean variations.

Among the participants in these festivities were the Garinagu, descendants of Africans and Caribs of the eastern Caribbean who were deported to Central America after resisting the French and British in the eighteenth century. Their coastal communities in Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, and southern Belize lived principally from fishing and agriculture. By 1811 they were selling produce in markets in Belize City, and by 1841 their largest settlement in Belize, Dangriga, was a flourishing community. Although they were increasingly drawn into the colony as migrant workers and some were settled on reservations, they maintained a distinctive culture that combines elements of their African and Carib origins.

The Independence Movement

The structure of Belizean government took several different turns during the eighteenth century. In 1854 the Legislative Assembly, elected on a restricted franchise, was created to replace the Public Meeting. The assembly was abolished in 1871 and the colony was placed under the rule of a lieutenant governor, subordinate to the governor of Jamaica, who administered the colony with a council that he appointed. In 1884, the post of lieutenant governor was replaced by that of governor and British Honduras gained administrative independence from Jamaica.

Although it was gaining a greater degree of self-government, Belize, like other British Caribbean colonies, had no strong anticolonial movement until the Great Depression of the 1930s. The Independence Movement was based on a labor movement that traced its roots to protests in 1894 against falling wages, which were made worse by a devaluation of the currency. Another, more serious riot in 1919 led by servicemen who had fought for the British in World War I (1914–1918), also contributed to the rise of organized labor. The riot protested rising prices and pervasive racism.

In 1920 a local branch of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) was founded in Belize to promote the social and economic mobility of blacks. The following year the founder and leader of the UNIA, Marcus Garvey, visited Belize. The presence of the UNIA and its journal, Negro World, contributed to an increase in racial consciousness and growing demands for civil rights among blacks in Belize. The most active and lasting black organization in Belize was the Black Cross Nurses, founded by Vivian Seay in 1920 and led by her until her death in 1971. While Seay and other middle-class Creole women played an important role in terms of social welfare and public service, they cooperated with the colonial administration. Other Garveyites, however, became leaders of the labor movement that sprang up in 1934 when Antonio Soberanis Gómez created the Labourers and Unemployed Association. A series of protests, demonstrations, and strikes put labor issues in the forefront of politics and promoted anticolonial feelings.

Elected representatives were reintroduced to the legislature in 1936, but high property qualifications and the exclusion of women under the age of 30 ensured that there would be little change in the institutions or distribution of authority in the colony. During World War II (1939–1945) the working class began to organize into labor unions. In 1939 Soberanis and R. T. Meighan created the British Honduras Workers and Tradesmen Union, which was renamed the General Workers' Union (GWU) in 1943. Other smaller organizations and parties also advocated a universal franchise and nationalism during the war. When the governor devalued the currency in 1949, overriding the Legislative Council and leading to higher prices, these various forces came together as a strong independence movement.

The independence movement was led by the People's United Party (PUP), which was founded in 1950 and based on the GWU. The PUP assumed an anti-British stance and demanded independence. Led by a Catholic Creole, George Price, the PUP has won all but two general elections since 1954, when universal suffrage was introduced. In those two elections (in 1984 and 1993), the PUP lost to the country's other major political party, the United Democratic Party (UDP). In the 1979 election, the PUP ran on a platform calling for independence from Britain, while the UDP called for a delay in independence pending resolution of the long-standing territorial dispute with Guatemala. The PUP won that election, and in 1981 a new constitution was drafted and independence was granted. Belize then became a member of the British Commonwealth of Nations and the United Nations (UN). The dispute with Guatemala was not settled, but Guatemala recognized Belize as an independent state in 1991.

Ethnic Relations in Modern Belize

Creoles, though not a numerical majority, had been the largest ethnic group for many years and had identified themselves with the emerging national identity. They assumed that they would be politically and culturally dominant after independence from Britain. To some extent this has occurred, in part because politics have been centered in Belize City, where most Creoles reside. Creole is the lingua franca, or most commonly spoken language, and Creoles predominate in the civil service, including the police and army. Racial prejudice and discrimination persist, however, and people with lighter skin are disproportionately represented among the more wealthy and influential social sectors. Poverty and unemployment are widespread, especially among the darker-skinned Creole and Garifuna youth in the towns. Creoles are not immune from prejudice themselves, and they traditionally view Garinagu as inferior and all Spanish-speaking mestizos and Maya as “aliens.” Such interethnic prejudices, inherited from the colonial experience, are pervasive.

Interethnic prejudices and tensions persist for three main reasons. The first reason is common in any situation of widespread poverty and unemployment, as found in Belize: In competing over scarce resources, many people adhere to ethnic allegiances and seek benefits for their “own people.” Second, Guatemala's long-standing territorial claim on Belize has prompted Creole Belizeans, in particular, to distrust the government of Guatemala. Hence, they tend to distrust those Belizeans who seem to them to be like Guatemalans, while Maya and mestizo Belizeans, in turn, resent the Creoles' attempts to achieve cultural and political hegemony. Third, in a country of only about 225,000 people, the migration of thousands of Creole and Garifuna Belizeans to the United States and of thousands of Central Americans into Belize has significantly changed the composition of the population. According to census data, in 1980 the population was 40 percent Creole and 33 percent mestizo, but by 2003 the numbers had shifted to 25 percent Creole and 49 percent mestizo. Many Creoles feel that the “Spanish” are taking over the country, while many mestizos feel that they are underrepresented in the country's important institutions. Smaller groups, such as the Garinagu (6 percent) and the Kekchí and Mopan Maya (10 percent), participate in national politics but feel quite marginalized.

Cultural organizations such as the United Black Association for Development (a Creole group inspired by the Black Power Movement of the 1960s), the National Garifuna Council, and the Toledo Maya Cultural Council, promote ethnic traditions and interests, but they do not compete for political power. The country's two political parties, the PUP and the UDP, are multiethnic. Belize is becoming culturally less Afro-Caribbean and more Central American, but since the end of British rule no group has achieved dominance over others. Despite the persistence of ethnic tensions, Belize remains a relatively peaceful multiethnic society.

See also Colonial Rule; Slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean.

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