Continuing the Yellow Caribs/ Black Caribs/Kalinago/ Garifuna conversation

Based on feedback I have had from different persons, including those from “beyond the river” I have decided to continue to expand on some issues I had raised in my UWI Heritage Month lecture and last week’s column. We had grown up with the terms Yellow and Black Caribs.

We had read about them in our school books, and we took in the sometimes very colourful depictions of these people that were handed down to us by “our colonial masters” whose sole purpose was to divide and rule in an effort at total control of a population whose lands they had invaded. Columbus claimed to have gotten the name ‘Carib’ from the Tainos and gave the impression that they were supposed to be man eating. The term Carib was linked with cannibalism and in my last column I made reference to the work of Richard Moore who had fought against the reference to cannibalism, no one having actually seen them eating human flesh.

Into the picture came the Black Caribs who were the offspring of cohabitation between the original Yellow Caribs and escaped Africans who were enslaved. The Europeans who wrote our history, the British in particular, were quick to point out that the escaped Africans and their off spring the Black Caribs had adopted many of the customs of the original Yellow Caribs. Later when they set about taking the lands of the indigenous people, they began to see the Black Caribs as a separate group that stole the lands of the Yellow Caribs and not as one people. In this case they claimed that they had a more legitimate claim to the land than the Black Caribs.

Now let us look at the terms Kalinago and Garifuna. These were the names by which the so-called Yellow and Black Caribs knew themselves. So, changes took place especially after 1992 when the indigenous populations of the Americas were attempting to reclaim their own history and to dispel the tales of the British and other Europeans generally. The Carib Village in Dominica became the Kalinago village in that process.

I need to emphasize that for almost three hundred years since the arrival of the Europeans, it was the Yellow Caribs (Kalinagos) who assisted the Taino of the north in their struggles against the Europeans. When a shortage of labour brought the Spanish to the Lesser Antilles it was the Yellow Caribs (Kalinagos) who spearheaded the struggle defending their own countries from European control. By the mid-sixteenth century black runaway ‘slaves’ began to be seen. By the mid- seventeenth century they joined forces with the Kalinagos and became an important part of the struggle.

The only serious attempt to colonise St. Vincent was in 1722 when efforts were made to settle the island, which along with St. Lucia had been granted by the monarch to the Duke of Montagu. They had a rude awakening in St. Vincent when on their sloop after inviting the Chiefs of the Black and Yellow Caribs and attempting “to open their hearts with wine” they informed them about their mission. Captain John Braithwaite in his report stated: “They told me, it was well I had not mentioned it ashore, for their power could not have protected me”. It was the signal for them to leave. By 1763 at the Treaty of Paris the English were given the right to colonise St. Vincent. The indigenous people were of course not part of this arrangement.

When they arrived in St. Vincent, the dominant group was the Garifuna (Black Caribs). Large numbers of Kalinago (Yellow Caribs) had died from their long period of struggle against the Europeans and from European diseases; some had even migrated south. The Garifuna occupied the lands which the British felt best suited to the production of sugar and so started a thirty- year struggle involving two wars- one from 1772-1773 and the final won from 1795 to 1796, after which those who were captured or had to surrender were placed at Balliceaux as a holding place until they were exiled to Ruattan off Honduras, before moving later to Belize, Honduras, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. Those who were not captured or surrendered moved into the interior where they continued to live their lives. After many hardships and struggles they became part of the Vincentian community, in the process suffering discrimination and still regarded as those people “Beyond the River.”

After a long period of cohabiting the two groups really became one. As one Anthropologist Nancie Gonzales stated, by the mid-eighteenth century, it was difficult to separate them, having the same customs, speaking the same language and fighting against the British in St. Vincent. So, when we regard them as Garifuna we are referring to descendants of both the Kalinago and Garifuna (Garinagu) people. The Garifuna insisted that the lands they occupied was handed down to them from their ancestors, the Kalinago people. They saw themselves as one people.

• Dr Adrian Fraser is a social commentator and historian