FREE eBOOK on the 1919 Revolution
FREE eBOOK on the 1919 Revolution
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YaYa Marin Coleman protesting 23rd July, 2019 on the proposed naming of Paslow Plaza in Belize City. Thomas Paslow was a British enslaver and mutilator of African people.
Black British Honduras soldiers line up at the Battlefield Park in front of the Court House
So great was the wave of patriotism which engulfed Belize after August 14th that there were immediate requests that an infantry force be recruited to supplement the British forces but, for racial reasons, were ignored by the War Office until King George V persuaded Kitchener to create a British West Indies’ regiment in order that his loyal Caribbean subjects might express that loyalty in a tangible form. Military service was a common expression of imperial loyalty. Afro-Caribbean and West Indian soldiers serving in the late nineteenth century played a key role in suppressing the riots in 1894 in which Caribbean soldiers stationed in Belize revolted against the white British colonial establishment. |
The 1919REVOLUTION is a community and art process developed and promoted by The UEF Library of African and Indigenous Studies and The Image Factory Art Foundation with support from our partners.
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BACK STORYBy the late 1890s brown middle-class Creoles realized that the changes in colonial administration benefitted only white elites. They were also alarmed with the 1894 riot. As a result, they sought to convince British officials to revive the system of an elected colonial legislature. This process was maintained by an allied-like relationship between the clearer middle-class creoles and the British authorities.The strategy of empire loyalty centered on the Battle of St. George’s Caye myth that posited unequal but harmonious cross-race fraternity as the colony’s central tradition. That myth was neither accepted nor appropriated by the popular classes as a basis for real political inclusion.
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