All De Way

Anticolonial nationalists won a sweeping victory last week in the first general elections ever held in backward little British Honduras (est. pop. 75,000). The People's United Party carried eight of the nine contested seats, enough to give them a majority in the Legislative Council set up under the colony's new constitution. Said Governor Patrick Renison: "We must give it a go. I will cooperate fully."

Loudly anti-British though the P.U.P. had been, its victory was far different from the 1953 triumph of British Guiana's People's Progressive Party, which led to the landing of troops and suspension of the colony's constitution. Profiting by the Guiana lesson. London has given British Honduras' newly chosen legislators none of the ministerial powers formerly granted the Guiana leaders. Guiana's leaders, moreover, were Reds: British Honduras' P.U.P. is not a Communist-influenced movement. On the contrary, most of its leaders learned their guiding principles from Jesuit fathers of St. Louis, who founded Belize's St. John's College in 1896 and taught Roman Catholic trade union-iS:m in extension courses begun in 1947. The P.U.P.'s trade-union twin, the Gener al Workers Union, is an outgrowth of these courses, and George Price, the slender 35-year-old descendant of slaves who runs both outfits, is a St. John's graduate and a Catholic. Say the priests: "If we hadn't stepped in, the Reds would have." One result of their work is that the P.U.P. is very friendly to the U.S.

On the eve of last week's election, which was unmarred by so much as a fist fight, Price harangued a crowd of 5.000 ebony-to-copper-hued partisans. "P.U.P., all de way," chanted the audience. When a speaker hailed Price as "our Gandhi, our George Washington and our future President," a plump mammy in the crowd cackled: "Dat's right, mon, dat's right." But P.U.P. leaders, soft-pedaling their old independence cry, said that the new majority wants first to cooperate with the governor and show that it is a stable and permanent political force. For a beginning, they wanted to see the government put some of its new $7,000,000 rehabilitation fund into low-income housing for the poor who now live in tin-roofed packing-crate huts. "Hear, hear," murmured the black men in their patched shirts and faded dungarees. Britain's newest experiment in developing responsible self-rule was already under way.

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