Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
A GARIFUNA HISTORY
The
Garifuna
(or Garinagu) trace their history back to
St Vincent
in the eastern Caribbean.
Originally home to the Arawaks, the island had, at the time of the earliest Spanish explorations,
recently been settled by people from South America, who called themselves Kalipuna or
Kwaib. Hence, probably, the names Garifuna, meaning cassava-eating people, and Carib.
Columbus's contemporaries reported encountering a mixed population, descended from
Carib men and Arawak women.
When two Spanish ships carrying
slaves
from Nigeria were wrecked off St Vincent in
1635, the survivors took refuge on the island. The Caribs and Africans initially clashed, but
the former had been weakened by war and disease, and the Africans gained enough of a
foothold to lead to the rise of the
Black Caribs
or Garifuna. Though the British nominally
controlled St Vincent for most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, vying for
control with France and the Netherlands, it belonged for all practical purposes to the
Garifuna. In the mid-1700s, the British attempted to assert full control, but were driven off
by the Caribs, with French assistance. Another attempt twenty years later was more
successful, and in 1783 the British imposed a treaty on the Garifuna, granting themselves
ownership of over half the island. Rejecting the treaty, the Garifuna continued to defy
British rule through frequent uprisings, consistently supported by the French. From 1795, a
year of bitter fighting aimed at establishing Garifuna independence inflicted horrendous
casualties and led to the loss of their leader, Chief Joseph Chatoyer. The Garifuna and
French finally surrendered on June 10, 1796.
Since Britain could not countenance free blacks living among slave-owning European
settlers, they decided to
deport
the Garifuna, whom they hunted down, destroying homes,
uprooting culture and causing hundreds of deaths. The survivors - around 4300 Black Caribs
and one hundred Yellow Caribs, as designated by the British - were transported to the nearby
island of Balliceaux. Within six months, over half died, many of yellow fever. In March 1797, the
remainder were shipped to
Roatán
,
one of the Bay Islands off Honduras. The Spanish
commandeered one of the ships and redirected it to the mainland at Trujillo; barely two
thousand Garifuna lived to see Roatán. A few years later, the Spanish
comandante
of Trujillo
arrived and took possession of the island, shipping survivors to his jurisdiction to augment his
labour force. The Spanish hadn't succeeded in agriculture, and the proficient Garifuna
benefited the colony considerably. Conscripted into the army, boys and men proved to be
effective soldiers and mercenaries. As their renown spread, they were brought to other areas
along the coast, and in 1802, 150 arrived in Stann Creek and Punta Gorda to be woodcutters.
The understanding they gained of the coastline made them expert
smugglers
, able to evade
Spanish restrictions on trade with the British.
THE GARIFUNA IN BELIZE
The incursion of the Garifuna into Belize did not please its British colonizers. Although
Superintendent Barrow ordered their expulsion in 1811, the Garifuna were still streaming in
when European settlers arrived in Stann Creek in 1823. Finding their mix of Catholicism,
ancestor worship and polygamy outrageous,
Methodist missionaries
attempted to
Christianize the Garifuna, with little success. The arrival of the largest single Garifuna migration
to Belize in 1832, when several hundred fled Honduras (by then the Central American
Republic) under the leadership of Alejo Benji, is still celebrated as
Garifuna Settlement Day
,
each November 19.
Through the
twentieth century
, Stann Creek (later Dangriga) was a stable community, with
women employed in bagging and stacking cohune nuts and men working in agriculture. The
Garifuna continued to travel widely for work, however, initially confining themselves to Central
America (where they can now be found all along the Caribbean coast from Belize to
Nicaragua), but in World War II they joined the crews of British and US merchant ships. Since
then, trips abroad have become an important part of the local economy, and there are small
Garifuna communities in New York, New Orleans, Los Angeles and London. Today, Belize
has a National Garifuna Council (
W
ngcbelize.org), which have refined a written language,
publishing
The People's Garifuna Dictionary
and school textbooks, and opened a museum in
Dangriga (see opposite).
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