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Introduction
- University Press of Mississippi
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3 Introduction The sun peeked timidly through the clouds above Dorsetshire Hill as the last flourish of the Vincentian national anthem lingered on the steel pan. The schoolchildren fidgeted through the brief speeches which the eye of the television camera dutifully recorded. Then came a sound, a tune vaguely familiar , but sung in a language few present could understand. It had been heard in St. Vincent the previous day in Kingstown’s Catholic cathedral and now the sixteen-strong delegation, returning from exile, were once again singing the Lord’s Prayer in Garifuna, a language known on this island long before people speaking English, French, or Spanish cast covetous eyes upon it. As they sang the Garifuna women rocked back and forth, bending low in unison in a simple dance that had the force of generations behind it, recalling both an African and an Amerindian past. A wreath was laid at the foot of the simple obelisk commemorating the Black Carib resistance leader Chatoyer—officially the Right Excellent Joseph Chatoyer, First National Hero of St. Vincent—and, as the hand drummers beat the retreat, the rain swept in once again to bring the ceremony to a hurried end. The members of the Garifuna delegation—men and women, young and old—were completing an emotional return to a long-lost homeland more than two hundred years after their ancestors were forced into exile. They had come from New York, scene of a second, voluntary, displacement; all were originally from Honduras or elsewhere along the Caribbean coast of Central America. Brimming with emotion, they had burst into song on arrival at the airport terminal building. For some of the Vincentians they met, the veneration the exiles felt for this small island towards the bottom of the Windward chain was fascinating, inspiring but also slightly puzzling, like being informed that they were already actually living in the promised land. For most people in the West Indies their idea of an ancestral homeland is usually somewhere else. My interest in the story of the Garifuna people began about twenty years ago in Nicaragua. In the village of Orinoco on Nicaragua’s remote (from Introduction 4 Managua) Atlantic Coast I watched a baseball match and heard in outline the story of the people’s origin in a shipwreck and a war on the island of St. Vincent. I visited the north coast of Honduras and, on a voyage from the village of Nueva Armenia, experienced first-hand the fabled excellence of Garifuna seamanship. It was only years later, on hearing an album by a Garifuna musician from Belize, with its lyrics in the Garifuna language and evident pride in Garifuna culture, that I began to wonder what the real history behind the music was. The Garifuna story is unique. While the history of all but the most recently arrived black populations of the Americas passes through the experience of slavery, Garifuna people take pride in their past as a free people living for generations according to their own customs on St. Vincent. Their language, passed down from the Amerindian side of their heritage, bears living witness to their radically different history. In colonial times they were known to antagonists and allies alike as Black Caribs, a name which encapsulates their mixed African/Amerindian heritage, and their story—from their traditional origin in a shipwreck, to their battles against the French and British, to their final, cataclysmic struggle to retain their independence at the end of the eighteenth century—is the subject of this book. The Black Caribs lived on the island of St. Vincent in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They resisted the designs of European colonizers for generations after the native people of other Caribbean islands had succumbed to white conquerors. After Britain was awarded St. Vincent by treaty (with the French, not the Caribs) in 1763 the struggle to maintain their independence intensified. The Black Caribs fought the British army to a standstill in a grueling six-month war in the early 1770s, rose again at the end of the decade to help the French oust the British, and, after the island had again been returned to their antagonists by treaty between the two European powers, waged one final struggle to kick the British out. Led by Chatoyer they came within an ace of succeeding, but at the decisive moment their leader fell in battle and the tide of the war turned. The Black Caribs fought on for another year before, abandoned by...