I knew that I was going to like this book when I opened the inside leaf and saw a quote from Alice Walker’s “Possessing the Secret of Joy.” As began working my way through “Thirteen Chapters of A History of Belize,” I realized that the book is different from most historical texts because it presents the history of a people from the perspective of the common man – and even more rare – the common woman. In his Introduction, Shoman makes pointed reference to an old African proverb: “Until lions have their own historians, histories of the hunt will always glorify the hunter. I have tried to tell the story with the lions in mind, the majorities who endured oppression and exploitation and survived and passed on to their children the will to struggle. Wherever possible, I have used their own voices and always I have tried to show that whatever glory there is is theirs.” The book demonstrates that this promise was kept. It eloquently combines broad-based themes with detailed factual accounts, including an extensive resource list and numerous footnotes.
The underlying theme of “Thirteen Chapters” is the impact of colonialism on the cultures and peoples of Belize, beginning with the Spanish conquest of the ancient Mayan civilizations. Shoman discusses how, contrary to popular belief, Mayan resistance to the Spanish, and later, the British occupiers of what is now modern Belize continued for several hundred years.
“Thirteen Chapters” includes detailed discussions of the brutality of the colonial slave society built by the British pirates and their descendants in Belize. A substantial section of one chapter presents a graphic description of several lawsuits brought unsuccessfully against wealthy slave owners for the torture and murder of their female slaves. Shoman does not spare the sensibilities of those who prefer myth to reality, including the myth of “benign” slavery and slaves who worked and even fought “shoulder to shoulder” with their wealthy white owners. Rather, as Shoman demonstrates, the enslaved people resisted in every possible way, sometimes by fleeing and often with armed struggle against a cruel, oppressive and racist system. Shoman introduces the reader to a lengthy list of individuals and organizations who participated in such resistance.
The Maya peoples who originally populated Belize and the African peoples taken to Belize to work as slaves viewed the land as belonging to the community as a whole, to be preserved for future generations. In contrast, the Spanish and British colonizers viewed land as something to take, to “own” and to plunder for immediate personal gain. Shoman believes that these strikingly different attitudes towards the land had, along with the institution of slavery, a continuing and negative impact on Belize and elsewhere in the formerly colonial world; since they are the root of the grossly disparate systems of labor and ownership that persist to this day.
Several of the “Thirteen Chapters” are devoted to a description of the Belizean workers ‘and social movements of the late nineteenth and twentieth century. Shoman’s discussion of those movements include the importance of women’s organizations in the struggle of Belizeans for economic, social and political justice. The book offers a detailed discussion of the interrelationships between workers’ movements and the nationalist movement that ultimately resulted in Belize becoming an independent nation in 1981; as well as the development of modern Belizean political parties.
Assad Shoman, a former legislative representative, senator and minister who is no longer active in party politics, believes in the importance of history. In the “thirteenth chapter” that concludes this book, he states that: “historical amnesia, imposed and to a large extent internalised, is that mind-set which allows people to forget those things in their past which are most capable of providing them with the intellectual, spiritual and emotional tools needed for present struggles.” This book is evidence of his determination that they will not be forgotten.
“Thirteen Chapters of A History of Belize” is an educational experience that should not be missed by anyone who is interested in history, politics, economics or sociology, not only of Belize, but of Central America, the Caribbean, or elsewhere in the developing world, including Belizeans in and out of Belize, visitors, scholars, educators and of course, those who are active in the struggle for social, political, economic, environmental, racial and gender justice. – Review by Susan Guberman Garcia
Update June 2011 Edition
Seventeen years after Thirteen Chapters of a History of Belize was published in 1994, author Assad Shoman launched the second edition of the book under the title, “A History of Belize in Thirteen Chapters”. In the new edition, Shoman preserves much of the content of the first book but has updated most of the data – some chapters are updated up to February 2011. This second edition book also includes a more comprehensive overview of the Guatemalan territorial claim to Belize. Shoman also takes a more detailed look at the economic situation of the country and what he calls the conceit of succesive Belize governments throughout the years.
Assad Shoman – Author
“I am not referring only or not even mainly to corruption in the sense that we talk about in Belize; that is to say that somebody in office whether a civil servant or a Minister takes money to do favours for other people, that happens, we know that happens.
“I was more referring to a corruption of the mind, of having bought into these neoliberal concepts, these ideas about how an economy should work when we have seen over the years that it does not work for the benefit of the vast majority. There are more rich people in Belize today than there were in 1981 but there is a hell of a lot more poor people too. What is it you want? What kind of economy, do you want? One that grows and grows but few people benefit? Or do you want an economy that is solid, that is sustainable, that is fair in the sense that those that work get the benefit.
“The neo liberal policies are precisely those that will lead to a greater gap between the rich and the poor that will benefit give advantage to those that have and those that know how to manipulate money and power and it will always go against the interest of people and working class people so that should come as no surprise as that has happened as a result of those policies.
“It’s called A History of Belize in Thirteen Chapters. Their was a first edition seventeen years ago which was called Thirteen Chapters of a History of Belize. This one is much bigger than the last edition because I’ve included a lot more material on the territorial disputes we have with both Guatemala and Mexico. It’s a lot richer in every sense, every stage of it, you know, both the old history as well as everything including the mediation, the Webster Mediation and everything as it flowed after that until the present day that is brought up to date completely.
“And I also go into the border dispute we have with Mexico which is still outstanding and then I include a lot more material on what has happened in Belize since independence. In particular the economics, everything that has happened in, well not everything but an explanation. Remember this has to be fairly brief because you’re covering a huge period of time and you’re really just introducing students and others to the subject.
“I have a very extensive, I believe, bibliography there which I believe will allow people to delve deeper into the issues which they have to do because all we can do in a book like this, of this sort, which is just like skim the surface, you know and point to issues that need to be researched more and discussed more and debated more, you know. So that is the essence of what I’ve done. I’ve cut down a little on earlier periods to give more time, more space to the later period and questions of governance and questions of economy and also an attempt to, as I did in the earlier part of the book and also in this latter part, to show how Belize fits into the world economy and the world governance so to speak.”
Introduction To The First Edition
Why 13 Chapters? Why not? I thought it might give the impression of a certain degree of arbitrariness; it could as well have been 11 or 21. I could have told a different story: any attempt at history-telling involves a selection of facts, a striking of a tone. In any case, I was born on the 13th; 13 is a critical number in Maya cosmology, and I finished writing this book on the 13th of July, 13 years after independence.
It began as a very different animal, more like a potage, a mish-mash of facts and comments strung together from different sources; a kind of history of Belize in ten easy gulps. Then I thought: but will this help to show how we ended up with what we have now? And: why should students delve into the dark hole of the past if not to illuminate the present and arm themselves to create a future?
And so I began writing anew, and later I took a pilgrimage to Earlville, in upstate New York. Outside: cold as ice. Inside: true like fire, my friend Nigel Bolland thrusting in my face the Gauguin painting, Who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going? And this version of 13 Chapters was born. It has been said that history only answers the questions you put to it; this book has posed those and other questions, but it has not always tried to give the answers. Sometimes you can’t. History rarely allows us to say authoritatively: this is what happened, this is what it meant.
An African proverb: until lions have their own historians, histories of the hunt will always glorify the hunter. I have tried to tell the story with the lions in mind, the majorities who endured oppression and exploitation and survived and passed on to their children the will to struggle. Wherever possible I have used their own voices, and always I have tried to show that whatever glory there is is theirs.
But I have avoided romanticizing the past-or the present. Belizeans need to come to terms with their history, warts and all; above all they need to understand how that history has been interpreted, and why. If that involves the painful process of examining, and shedding, some cherished myths, so be it.
Hence a major goal was to leave young readers – for whom I have written this story-no excuse to confuse reality with other people’s self-serving versions of it; no excuse to feel inferior-or superior-to anyone else; above all no excuse to believe that they cannot change the world, but to realize that to do so they must learn to live and work together with others.
I was warned against bringing this story up to 1994; I chose to ignore those warnings. I was mindful especially of young students struggling to make sense of their surroundings, to understand why there is at once so much wealth and so much poverty in the land, to relate to what they see on television and on the streets. The ethnic and sexual segregation of the work force; the high-flying politicians and the low-lying “pimpers”; why we buy imported water and sell passports; the gang and the sprang-the roots of all these phenomena are to be found in our history. To understand the present by seeing how it has been shaped by the past: in this sense to make history come alive and help us kick butt? This to me overrode the arguments about lack of”perspective” or of “objectivity”.
No history is “objective” or “impartial,” no more than education is. Everybody takes sides; be wary only of those who will not admit it. Facts and values are not as neatly separable as we often pretend they are; and even one’s selection of what facts to reveal, what story to tell, betrays one’s values. Anything can pass for “the truth”; ask only whose truth it is and whose purpose does it serve, and don’t let them impose their truth on you.
This is why I found it necessary to deal with the “origin myth” of the Battle of St. George’s Cay so fully: it incapacitates us for battle. We’ve known for long that “there ain’t no black in the Union Jack”. But it was not in vain that Lord Cromer boasted that the British “possess in a very high degree the power of acquiring the sympathy and confidence of any primitive races with which they are brought into contact”. Yes, colonizers love to be loved, and in Belize, as in their other colonies, the British created enough Anglophiles to make them believe, perhaps, that their Empire was in truth a benign civilizing force. Aha, I hear you ask, but whose truth? Good, we’re getting the picture.
But are there not “internal colonialisms” as work as well? What does it mean that we want to make big tourist bucks off the “Mundo Maya” project but never thought to invite the Maya to have a say in it? That we take visiting dignitaries to visit Maya “ruins” but don’t give a thought to how we continue to ruin the lives of the Maya? Do you not think that the Maya might have said often as they saw a European approaching, “Is that a dagger or a crucifix I see you hold so tightly in your hand?” Might not many Belizeans have voiced the same question through the years?
The nationalists used the Maya in staking out their claim for nationhood as against the colonial power; dozens of poems about this “Mayaland” were churned out. The architecture of the dead Maya was used to fashion the National Assembly, but the living Maya have not been allowed to be architects in the fashioning of the nation. The Maya as a people have been effectively excluded from having a deciding voice in constructing Belizean society.
So has the working class. Does not the role of work and workers tell us a lot about how Belize has evolved and what it is like today? It is for work that Africans were brought as slaves; it explains to a large degree why people come, and why people leave. But we are left with this question: how come those who work the hardest end up with the least to show for their labour? We have been told that workers are lazy, or unambitious, or stupid, or just plain “bad luckied”. Can a reading of a history which includes the voices of workers help us to understand that in fact they have been purposely, and often forcefully, excluded?
Women, of course (and as a matter of course), were excluded both as members of class and ethnic groupings and, systematically, as women. As long ago as 1700, when slavery in the Americas was in its heyday, and half a century before Rousseau wrote “Man is born free and is everywhere in chains,” a woman dared to ask: “If all Men are born Free, how is it that all women are born Slaves?”
The theme of exclusion by the powerful and of struggles for inclusion by the majorities is one that runs through this book. Also: the geopolitical connections with the region, from before the Europeans came to the present. The convergence of peoples and cultures, and how they related to and influenced each other. The fact that Belize is unique, yet in many ways it is the same as other countries. The fact that racism was an integral, constitutive part of our history, as it is of our present: if “racism rests on the ability to contain blacks in the present, to repress and to deny the past,” then it becomes an urgent task to expose that past. Perhaps the most pervasive theme is that Belize as a nation state was created and shaped by the phenomenon of Empire and that the imperial system, with its roots going back to 1492, continues to exercise tremendous influence over what we do and how we think.
But does this mean that the people who make up Belize have no control over the making of Belize? No. As Karl Marx said, “Men make their history . . . but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past”. Belizean women and men can take control of their own destinies and make of this space they inherited a more human and dignified landscape. An overriding theme of this book is that to do so they must first know and interpret their history and then take concerted action to shape their destinies in as much as circumstances allow them to.
The most coveted area of conquest is always the mind; empires can lose land, but if they control people’s minds their domination is assured. Stuart Hall says that the field of culture is “a sort of constant battlefield … where no once-for-all victories are obtained but where there are always strategic positions to be won and lost”. He talks about “the absolutely essential relations of cultural power – of domination and subordination which is an intrinsic feature of cultural relations”. This dialectic of cultural struggle is inherent throughout the text; it is up to the reader to make the connections.
Inspired perhaps by Tina Turner, I have bro ken a few rules. I have not always followed a chronological order, finding it more important at times to treat a subject thematically and to relate it to the present. I have not attached footnotes to the text, since I felt this might clutter it and distract the student or other reader, although I have noted the most important direct sources in notes at the back of the book and provided a very full bibliography. In a very few instances, I have managed to slip some humour past my editors. And I have refused to “write down” to what I am told is the level of high school students. I expect them to use a dictionary when necessary; if one doesn’t provide a challenge, what is the point of the game? I also expect teachers to contribute to understanding. Perhaps a teacher’s guide can be published later?
I realise that there are many lacunae in this book, but the one that most concerns me is my failure to deal with environmental issues. This has nothing to do with my ideas about its importance, which I know is tremendous; it is a result of my own abysmal ignorance of the subject. If I ever get to do a second edition I will arm myself with the knowledge to correct this omission. It is also my hope that by then there will be more empirical data, and a body of theoretical work, available to sustain a feminist perspective of Belizean history.
I would very much welcome comments from readers, particularly those pointing out any errors of fact, critical omissions or differences of interpretation.
Assad Shoman, Santa Elena, Cayo 13 July1994.