My first visit to Honduras was in 1998, to the city of San Pedro Sula, for a meeting of continent-wide Afrodescendant leaders planned by the AfroAmerica XXI organization, with the support of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB).
That is where my first contact with the Garifuna culture began. Touring through the San Pedro Sula market, I got a cazabe (a kind of bread made with yucca flour, similar to the breads that exist in Venezuela and other Indigenous communities throughout Colombia). During the meeting, we discussed issues of poverty and discrimination, as well as eviction from their lands that the Garifuna were suffering along the Atlantic coast.
A few years later, in 2011, I had the opportunity to travel to the island of St. Vincent, an island governed by English colonialism due to a peace treaty enacted between France and England in 1763. Under the geopolitical control of the English, the trade in enslaved Africans and slavery deepened on Saint Vincent as it had already done in other Caribbean islands such as Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, and Barbados.
Carib Indians, originally from the region of the mouth of Venezuela’s Orinoco River, had already settled on the islands of Saint Vincent. With the arrival of Africans who had been enslaved by the French, a genetic and cultural mixture ensued. Their Afro-Indigenous offspring were called Garinagus or Black Caribs.
The Garinagus or Garifuna pretty much controlled this island, and their leader Joseph Satuye emerged there. The English, once they took control of the island, initiated a savage fight against the Garifuna and assassinated Satuye in 1795.
Later, the Garifuna were expelled by the English and sent to Roatan Island in Central America, off the coast of Honduras. With time and through a culture of resistance, the Garifuna culture emerged, structured with a linguistic and cultural system unique in the world. Today, the Afro-Indigenous have a specific name in the Caribbean. Their Garifuna culture originates in Saint Vincent; continues to Roatan Island; moves to Central America; and is seen in Nicaragua, Belize, and Guatemala.
Culture and spirituality
The Garifuna music and dance culture starts with the toque and the punta dance, followed by the Habinahan Wanaragua Jankunu Festival ( John Canoe Festival). In New York, I had the opportunity to meet and learn from many Garifunas who migrated to that city to start to rebuild after Hurricane Katrina in August 2005.
The Garifuna diaspora counts its largest population as living between New Orleans and New York. The food known as machuca is part of a thick fish soup combined with coconut, spices, and vegetables such as yucca, plantains, and others. After eating machuca, the Garifuna drink a beverage known as gifiti, which is made from traditional herbs and alcohol. The Garifuna spirituality is known as dugu, where they remember their ancestors and their point of origin: Saint Vincent Island.
Reparations
The Garifuna people have resisted for more than 300 years in a prolonged struggle to conserve their cultural system, although the governments of the Garifuna diaspora have not understood the demands of this people and have caused many to migrate to other countries such as the United States due to evictions from their lands on the Caribbean coast. The Garifuna have been evicted from their lands so developers can build tourist projects — which the Garifuna cannot enter. The Organización Fraternal Negra Hondureña /Black Fraternal Organization of Honduras (OFRANEH) has been denouncing this situation of dispossession for years –– just last year, the organization won recognition from the Fund for Global Human Rights for their work.Ralph Gonsalves, prime minister of Saint Vincent, is one of the few leaders who accepts the Garifuna culture as a cultural, spiritual, and political system. In his speeches, he always claims Joseph Satuye as one of his great galvanizers in claiming his Afro-Indigenous heritage, as he insisted on doing in his speech at the first International Conference on Reparations that we organized in Caracas, Venezuela, in May 2018.
Correction: The Ethnogenesis between the Garifuna population, is between Shipwrecked African Captives and Kalinago, who asslimated into Indigenous Culture.