the garifuna people of belize

St. Vincent

Two peoples became one on St. Vincent

The story starts in the eastern Caribbean. The Kalinago, who called themselves Kalinago or Kalipuna rather than the Spanish label "Carib", had held St. Vincent for centuries, farming cassava, fishing and building canoes. Through the 1600s, West Africans joined them. Some escaped slavery on nearby islands, Barbados above all, crossing to a mountainous island the colonisers struggled to reach. Others were taken in Kalinago raids and absorbed into Kalinago families. By 1646 a French observer recorded Africans living among them, and by 1700 the two had become one people.

That people carried both inheritances. Cassava farming, canoe building and an Arawakan language came from the Kalinago side. The celebration of ancestors came from West Africa. Children learned their mothers' language and boys later took up their fathers', which is why Garifuna still has words that differ by the speaker's sex: a man says au for "I", a woman says nuguya.

1795 to 1797

War, Balliceaux, and the exile of 1797

After 1763 Britain claimed St. Vincent and began carving up Kalinago land for sugar estates. The Kalinago held their ground through decades of fighting, and in 1795, allied with the French revolutionary Victor Hugues, they went to war one final time. Their paramount chief, Joseph Chatoyer, was killed in March 1795, and they surrendered on 10 June 1796.

The British then rounded up more than 4,000 people and held them on Balliceaux, a small, bare island in the Grenadines. Around 2,400 died there of hunger and disease. On 11 March 1797 the 2,248 survivors were put aboard a convoy of eight ships, and 2,026 reached Roatán, off Honduras, on 12 April. Within months three in four had moved to Trujillo on the mainland, and from there Garinagu spread along the Caribbean coast of Central America.

Arriving in Belize

Working in Belize long before 1832

Garinagu were in the British settlement of Belize by 1799, cutting wood and moving goods by boat, and about 150 were working there by 1802. They were not welcome. An 1811 law punished any "Carib" found in the settlement after dark without permission, and an 1812 law fined anyone who hired one fifty pounds. Labour was scarce, though, so they were hired anyway and kept to the south, which was still disputed with Spain.

The largest arrival came in 1832. Garinagu at Trujillo had fought on the losing side of a civil war in Central America, and fearing for their lives they fled to Stann Creek and Punta Gorda. Most accounts tie 19 November to that landing. By 1850 about 1,000 Garinagu lived in Stann Creek and 400 in Punta Gorda, with more at Sibun, Seven Hills and other villages.

Teachers and voters

Garinagu taught Belize and helped win the vote

From the late 1800s, the Catholic and Methodist churches trained Garinagu as teachers and sent them into the country's most remote villages. The first two Garifuna teachers were Cirilo Guiterrez of Punta Gorda and Mr. Arzu of Barranco, in 1892. In 1907 a young teacher named Andres Enriquez walked two days through swamp to reach the Maya village of San Antonio in Toledo, where he taught and lived in a thatch hut for eight dollars a month.

Garinagu were also at the front of the push for democracy: G.A. Nunez led the local chapter of Marcus Garvey's UNIA, and Garinagu marched in the labour movement of the 1930s and the fight for universal adult suffrage. In the first elections it allowed, Nathaniel Cacho won Stann Creek in 1954, and David McKoy and Faustino Zuniga won Stann Creek and Toledo in 1957.

19 November

How Garifuna Settlement Day became a holiday

On 16 November 1941, Thomas Vincent Ramos, Mateo Avaloy and C.J. Benguche signed a resolution in Stann Creek asking for a day to recognise the Garinagu. Two years later the colonial Gazette declared Friday 19 November 1943 a public and bank holiday in the Stann Creek District, as Stann Creek Settlement Day. It became a national holiday in the 1970s, the same decade Stann Creek Town took the name Dangriga.

Today the celebration starts the night before with drumming that runs until dawn, when canoes come ashore carrying cassava, plantain and drummers in a re-enactment of the arrival. Dangriga has the biggest celebration, and Hopkins, Seine Bight, Georgetown, Punta Gorda and Barranco hold their own.

For dates, the dawn re-enactment and where to stay, see our Garifuna Settlement Day guide.

Language, drums, dance

A language and a music UNESCO set out to protect

Garifuna is an Arawakan language with French and West African words folded in. The counting numbers come from French, and words such as hudu, to crush, come from West Africa. Garifuna teachers wrote the first dictionary in the 1950s, and the National Garifuna Council published The People's Garifuna Dictionary in 1993. On 18 May 2001, UNESCO proclaimed Garifuna language, dance and music a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity.

The music is drums first. A bass drum, the segunda, and a tenor drum, the primero, play together under a lead singer and a call-and-response chorus. Each rhythm has its dance: punta, hüngühüngü, sambai, charikanari, chumba, and wanaragua, the masked dance known elsewhere in the Caribbean as Jankunu. Paranda grew from berusu, an older guitar genre, and now adds drums and shakers.

Wanaragua belongs to the Christmas season, so it pairs well with a December trip to Belize.

Food

Cassava, plantain, coconut and fish

Garifuna cooking grew out of a life by the sea and a garden of cassava, plantain, banana and yams. Ereba, the flat cassava bread, is made from bitter cassava that is grated, strained, sifted and baked. Hudut is green plantain boiled and pounded smooth, eaten with lasusu falumou, fish cooked in coconut milk. Darasa, tapou and bundiga are made from green banana or plantain, and sweet cassava becomes cassava pudding.

Drinks come from the same garden. Hiu is made from bitter cassava and gungude from dried green banana. Look for hudut at family-run places in Hopkins and Dangriga rather than resort menus, and for ereba from home bakers.

For the rest of the country's kitchens, see Belizean food and cuisine.

Spirituality

Ancestors, the dabuyaba and the dügü

Garifuna spirituality centres on the áharigu, the spirits of the people you descend from. They are honoured, fed and remembered, not worshipped, in a bond that runs from parent to child and back again after death. Ancestors speak through dreams, and a buyei, a spirit medium, helps families understand what they ask. Food offerings, memorial Masses and libations keep the obligation alive.

The most important ceremony is the dügü, a family's offering to its ancestors, held over several days in a dabuyaba, an ancestral house rather than a temple. It is led by the buyei, with three large segunda drums and úgulendu songs. Garinagu also embraced Christianity, so you may see a cross or a statue of the Virgin Mary on a dabuyaba altar. The tradition survived because people defended it: in Dangriga, Balvina Velasquez Cacho fought the Catholic Church for years to keep the town's dabuyaba, then the only one in the country, and took her children out of the Catholic school to do it.

Where to go

Where to experience Garifuna culture in Belize

Hopkins is the easiest place to start. It is a beach village with Garifuna drumming lessons, family-run kitchens and a long stretch of resorts to the south. Dangriga is the cultural capital and the home of Settlement Day, with the T.V. Ramos monument in town. Seine Bight on the Placencia peninsula, Georgetown, Punta Gorda and Barranco in Toledo are all Garifuna communities too.

Garinagu were about 7 percent of Belize's population in 1980 and about 4 percent in the 2022 census, as families moved to Belize City and the United States. That makes the coastal villages, where the language and drumming are still lived every day, all the more worth the trip.

Choosing a base? Compare Hopkins and Dangriga side by side.