Flag of Belize

How to read it

The flag was first flown at independence on 21 September 1981. The Government of Belize describes it as a royal blue flag with one horizontal red stripe at the top, one at the bottom, and a white circle with the coat of arms in the centre. In August 2019 Nigel Encalada, director of the Institute for Social and Cultural Research at the National Institute of Culture and History (NICH), told Channel 5 that there was no document showing what the flag should look like. The National Celebrations Commission then presented a standard design and colour scheme, modelled on the description lodged at the College of Arms in London in October 1981 and on the colours of the 1981 flag, and a statutory instrument was being drafted with the Attorney General’s office to fix them in law. Each year a flag-raising ceremony on 1 September opens Belize’s independence celebrations.

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The coat of arms piece by piece

The Government of Belize explains each part. The mahogany tree at the top is the country’s economic foundation, and the motto beneath the shield, “Sub umbra floreo”, is Latin for “Under the shade I flourish”, meaning the shade of the mahogany tree. The two men either side are the woodcutters: one carries an axe, for the logwood cutters, and the other an oar, for the way the workers travelled by river to find the logwood and carry it out. The shield is divided in three: an oar and a squaring axe on the left, a saw and a beating axe on the right, and a ship in full sail at the base. Around it all is the wreath of 50 olive leaves for 1950.

Encalada told the press conference in 2019, as Amandala reported it, that the two men are a Creole Belizean and a Mestizo Belizean, the two largest ethnic groups at the time of independence.

Why the flag was standardised in 2019

Belizeans had complained for years that copies of the flag did not match, Channel 5 reported. Amandala wrote that the two woodcutters had changed in colour and stature from one version to the next, in some so much that they distorted the ethnicities they were meant to show. The standard design keeps the men as they were in the flags already in circulation, but makes the axe on the upper left of the shield silver, and redraws the paddle after archive photographs from about 1880 so that it looks like the paddles used in the river valley. NICH planned a six-month grace period for official bodies to phase out the older versions.