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The Garífuna trace their history back to the island of St Vincent,
in the eastern Caribbean, when two Spanish ships, carrying slaves
from Nigeria to their colonies in America, were wrecked off the
coast in 1635. The survivors took refuge on the island, which was
already inhabited by Caribs , themselves recent arrivals from
South America, who had subdued the original natives, the Kalipuna
, from whom it is likely the Garífuna derived their own name. At
first there was conflict between the Native Americans and the
Africans, but the Caribs had been weakened by wars and disease and
eventually the predominant race was black with some indigenous
blood, becoming known by the English as the Black Caribs.
For most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries St Vincent was
nominally under British control, though in practice it belonged to
the Caribs, who successfully fended off British attempts to gain
full control of the island until 1796. The British colonial
authorities, however, could not allow a free black society to
survive amongst slave-owning European settlers, so the Carib
population was hunted down and transported to Roatán , off
the coast of Honduras, where the British abandoned them. The Spanish
Commandante of Trujillo, on the Honduran mainland, took the 1700
surviving Black Caribs to Trujillo, where they became in demand as
free laborers, fishermen and soldiers. Their intimate knowledge of
the rivers and coast also made them expert smugglers, evading the
Spanish laws that forbade trade with the British in Belize.
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 Belize
travel guide
Caribbean
guide
In
the early nineteenth century small numbers of Garífuna moved
up the coast to Belize, establishing themselves in the area before
the first European settlers arrived in Stann Creek in 1823. The
largest single migration to Belize took place in 1832 when thousands
fled from Honduras (then part of the Central American Republic)
after they supported the wrong side in a failed revolution to
overthrow the Republican government. It is this arrival which is
today celebrated as Garífuna Settlement Day, though it seems
likely that many arrived both before and after. |
Belize
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