AfroHonduran articles

Honduras Home to Four Very Different Afro-Honduran Cultures

By Wendy Griffin

In Honduras there are 4 Afro-Honduran groups-The Garifunas, the Black English speakers, usually known as Isleños, the Miskitos, and Ladinos, some of whom are of Afro-Mestizo descent. The Garifunas who are descended from Arawak and Carib Indians who intermarried with Africans on the Caribbean island of St. Vincent, in addition to living in Honduras, also live along the coasts of Belize, Guatemala, and Nicaragua, and are found in immigrant communities in the US such as New York, Los Angeles, Houston, Miami, Seattle, Chicago, and Atlanta. Some Belizean Garifunas also ended up in Canada, particularly in the Toronto area. The story of how the Garifunas on St. Vincent were defeated by the British after 30 years of war, and then transported to Honduras is shown in the Garifuna in Peril movie, which has played in most major US cities, in Europe, in Toronto in Canada, in Africa, in Central America, and in South America this year.  This movie also has a theme the land problems of the Garifunas.

Because the Garifuna men were fishermen, the Garifunas generally lived on right on the Caribbean Coast near white sand beaches and beautiful green forests. This has put their lands in the sights of international real estate developers and tourism projects, including founding protected areas on top of lands they used to get craft and construction materials, medicinal plants,  hunt, or farm, as noted in Keri Brondo’s 2013 book Land Grab, or Wendy Griffin’s “Los Garifuna de Honduras” and many Honduras This Week and HondurasWeekly.com articles.

Prior to 1960 and the introduction of scuba diving tourism in the Bay Islands of Honduras, the Black English speaking Bay Islanders who made up seven-eighths of the population in the Bay islands prior to tourism, mostly worked as farmers, raising coconuts, chickens, bananas, plantains, root crops like arrowroot, yams, cocoyams, malanga, manioc also called cassava or yucca, and island fruits, which collectively were known as “breadkind”.  They also fished, gathered food on the beach and in the swamps like crabs, and many of the men spent time working as sailors both for cargo ships and for cruise boats. However, since the 1990’s and especially since cruise boats have begun coming to Roatan in the Bay Islands, the Black Bay islanders are being displaced by tourism. Over 70% of the land in the Bay Islands is now devoted to tourism, notes Bay Islander Artlie Brooks in his 2012 book Black Chest, plus there are whole new communities of Mestizos from the mainland of Honduras, to work in these tourist jobs, and also foreigners are buying land in the Bay Islands, with at least two international real estate companies in the Bay Islands.

Lands in West Bay on Roatan which used to be a swamp where the Bay islanders collected crabs and picked wild cocoplums and seagrapes and was reached by a small boats like dories, now cost $1 million an acre for beachfront property. Obviously the Bay Islanders can not make a living growing “breadkind”  if there is so much pressure on their land and it has such a high value. Almost any irregularity you can imagine regarding real estate has happened in the Bay Islands—people selling who were not owners, or not the full owners, judges ordering Bay islanders houses destroyed to sell the land to foreigners even though it was illegal to title the beach to anyone under Honduran law, environmental agencies tearing down Bay islander latrines over the reef so that they would not bother the divers, but offering no other alternatives where to go to the bathroom, etc. See my book on the History and Culture of the Bay Islanders and English speakers of Honduras on the internet which is available for free for more examples.

 

The Miskito Indians are descendants of Blacks who ran away to the Mosquitia rainforest who intermarried with the local Indian women. Blacks under Spanish control had already begun rebelling against the Spanish by the mid-1540’s, 70 years before there are Pilgrims in the US, and running away to the mountains or the rainforest. The British brought more African slaves to work in cutting mahoghany or planting sugar cane and rice, who either ran away or when the British left the Mosquitia, they just deserted them there. Also after slaves were given freedom in Jamaica and Belize and Gran Cayman, and especially during the banana boom in Honduras and Nicaragua, Blacks from these countries  and even from the US started families with Miskito women. 

Many Ladinos or the Spanish speakers of Honduras are partially descended from black slaves brought in to work in mining industry, in processing indigo, and on cattle ranchers, who intermarried with the Indians and with the Spanish. There were usually 10 times more Spanish men than Spanish women in Honduras, so most Spanish men who came to Honduras formed families at first with Indian and black women, and then by preference more with mestiza and mulata women.

While most Hondurans are willing to admit that there were Blacks in Honduras, and that these included Garifunas, Black English speakers and Miskito Indians, the subject of blacks having married into the best families of Honduras or certain towns having been famous as mulato towns into the early 20^th century, is not widely discussed in Honduras, and is definitely not taught in Honduran schools, so that even the Garifunas or the mulatos themselves do not know if the two groups are related or different, and what the history of the mulatos of Honduras is.

The lands of all of these Afro-Honduran groups were not titled in the colonial period of Honduras, either because the areas where these groups lived was not part of Honduras or because colonial land laws did not have any category of land that could be titled to people of mixed race or Black. This situation often did not improve much in the 19^th century, with only vague promises of respecting the lands of the people under the Miskito king, or under the British crown, in treaties that made the Bay islands, the Mosquitia, and North Coast of Honduras legally part of Honduras.

These Afro-Hondurans have repeatedly faced pressures on their lands and resources due to the development scheme of the day-cattle ranching, mahoghany logging, rubber and chicle, frozen seafood, searching for petroleum, African palms and coconut oil, bananas for export, and tourism. The lack of good land titles often combined with a flagrant disrespect for human rights, or even the right to live, and lack of educational or viable work opportunities in their communities has resulted in massive displacements of these peoples including to all of Honduras’s largest cities and also to many of the US’s larger cities like New York, Miami, Houston, Los Angeles. Atlanta, Boston, New Orleans, and Seattle. These problems are expected to grow worse under the new Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez.

 

 

 

 

Central American Blacks Generally Absent From Central American School Curriculums

Published by HondurasWeekly.com in Culture.

By Wendy Griffin

At a Forum on Bilingual Intercultural Education that was held in Tegucigalpa, Honduras in August 2013as part of the Congress of Central American Linguists’ Association (ACALING), the National General Director of Bilingual Intercultural Education for the Honduran Ministry of Education in Honduras  Yohann Jomsom began his presentation with a quote, “The Education of Today is not really relevant to Blacks and Indians.”  Yohann Jomson is a Black English speaking Bay Islander with a Master’s degree from the traditional Bay Islander community of Pensacola, Roatan and has worked on the issue of bilingual intercultural education in Honduras for more than 5 years.

One reason it is not relevant to Black Bay Islanders is that the National School Curriculums of Central America totally leaves them and their history out, as noted by the recent book by Trinity College historian Dr. Dario Euraque and Honduran historian Yesenia Martinez, currently an employee of the Honduran Ministry of Education,  on the presence of the African Diaspora in Central American School curriculums.  The publication of this book in Spanish  in Honduras by Editorial Guaymuras, the leading social science publisher in Honduras, was partially funded by the Harriet Tubman Institute of African American Studies of York University in Canada.

The content of this book was recently presented by Yesenia Martinez at a second forum on the Challenges of Bilingual Intercultural Education in Trujillo, Honduras in December 2013 which was attended by the Honduran Minister of Education Marlon Escoto, mayors and school superintendants of North Coast towns, and representatives of the Pech Indians and Garifuna teachers.  The Garifunas are an Afro-Indigenous group, previously known as Black Caribs, who live in 54 villages along the North Coast of Honduras,  in many important US cities including New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Houston, Chicago, and Atlanta, and in Belize, Nicaragua and Guatemala. The Caribbean Sea is named for their Carib ancestors.

The history and culture of the Garifunas is also not included well in Honduran school curriculums noted Dr. Dario Euraque and Yesenia Martinez’s book, nor in the school curriculums of any of the other Central American countries. These countries, with the exception of Panama, also leave out the whole question of slavery, either indigenous or Black, and the important historic  roles of  the descendants of  the Blacks and mulattos brought to Honduras to work in the  mining, forestry and cattle ranching industries.This book includes extensive lists of books that have good information on Central American Blacks.

Also Wikipedia editors have been working over the last few years to improve articles on Afro-Central Americans, their history and their religion and their culture and significant musicians. It is a good idea to look under the names of the individual groups like Miskito Indians, Garifunas, as well as Afro-Central Americans.  Also look up the names of singers like Aurelio Martinez, Paul Nabor, Andy Palacio, or the name of the Garifuna religion dugu. Sometimes the history of an area dominated by Afro-Hondurans is in an article about the area like Miskito Coast or Bay Islands of Honduras or Trujillo. Many food articles in Wikipedia like fried plantains, cassava bread  include references to the foods of Afro-Hondurans and Afro-Central Americans.
Historic Roles of Afro-Latin Americans Left Out of Research Agendas, Public Schools and Libraries

Published by HondurasWeekly.com

By Wendy Griffin

If Afro-Central Americans are left out of Central American curriculums, the issue of Afro-Latin Americans is also usually left out of US school curriculums and books available in the US as well. A recent Pew Charitable Trust Foundation report stated that “25% of all school age children in the US speak Spanish, but that in few books that are available in US libraries are there drawings or photos of people of any race other than white.”

 This problem of the lack of photos of Black people doing anything positive is stated as one of the reasons for the creation of Black newspapers and magazines like Jet and Ebony in the US. Television shots of Black young men being led away in handcuffs grab consistently grab TV  news headlines, while the positive contributions of Blacks anywhere often do not qualify as “news” in the US, noted one Pittsburgh Pennsylvania resident.

The need for the most basic research on Afro-Central Americans being missing from the agenda of historians was brought home by University of Pittsburgh historian Dr. Reid Andrews’s book Afro-Latin America. He begins his book by saying that, “If we look at where most of the African slaves went after leaving Africa, the bulk went to the Caribbean and Latin America, not to the US.”  One famous example is Brazil which has the second largest number of people of African descent in the world after Nigeria.

However,  Dr. Andrews says in his introduction, that he did not include Central American Blacks in his book, which has been translated into Spanish and Portuguese, because he said he could not find enough information on Central American Blacks to include them. This has been a call to get published the research that was being done resulting in new excellent  US books like Blackness in Central America by Lowell Gudmundson and Tulane University historian Dr. Justin Wolfe, and Glenn Chambers’ book Race, Nation, and West Indians in Honduras.

Afro-Central American Authors and Musicians Often Have Family Ties to Atlanta and Caribbean

By Wendy Griffin

US Garifunas, an Afro-indigenous group which lived primarily on the Central American Coast before immigrating to the US, have also published books about their history. Sabas Whittaker’s “Africans in the Americas”, is a book that documented the links between Africans in the Caribbean and in Central America and in the US.  His book is now out of print, but maybe available through Interlibrary loan.

Sabas Whittaker’s mother was a Black English speaker born on Roatan, Honduras and her family came from Gran Cayman, while Sabas’s father was a Garifuna from Roatan. Sabas’s family tree on his mother’s side also includes English speaking Jews, East Indians, English people as well as a Grandfather who was descended from Black Caymanian slaves.  Sabas’s daughter Onyana Whittaker, who has contributed poems to his book of poems he has published and did the graphic design for books and CD covers and his website, lives in Smyrna, in the greater Atlanta area, where she is a freelance graphic designer, and he also has children in the Miami area.

 In addition to poetry and history Sabas Whittaker also writes in the area of Mental health like “Faith in the Field” about the mentally ill and churches, and has done plays which have been produced as fundraisers about the Homeless and has made at least 3CD’s of music in the genre of Latin Jazz. Sabas Whittaker is acknowledged for his help in the research on Black English speakers of Honduras for example in the recently published study by  Dr. Ross Graham on English in Honduras, included in the 2013 multi-volume book “World Englishes.”.

He also contributed to Wendy Griffin’s 2004 book “The History and Culture of Bay islanders and  Black English speakers in Honduras” which is available for free on the Internet. Wendy Griffin also has ties to Atlanta where her sister Pam Lawrence lives with her family in Alpharetta, in northern Fulton County.

Garifunas, Miskito Indians and Black Bay Islanders in Honduras have also published a number of  books since Dr. Andrews’ book on Afro-Latin America which said that too little information was available on Central American blacks to include them was published including “Black Chest” by Artlie Brooks, a Black Bay islander, “La Moskitia desde Adentro” (The Mosquitia from Inside)by Miskito Indian Scott Wood, and “Los Garifunas de Honduras” (the Garifunas of Honduras) by Wendy Griffin and CEGAH-Comité de Emergencia Garifuna de Honduras/Garifuna Emergency Committee of Honduras.

One of the members of CEGAH who helped write the book “Los Garifunas de Honduras” is Balbina Chimilio, the mother of a special education teacher Dorina Chimilio who also lives in the Greater Atlanta area in Gwinett County. Balbina’s son who is a sailor on the petroleum cargo ship is also home based out of Atlanta.  CEGAH is also the subject of a video on vimeo.com called Comite de Emergencia Garifuna and are the producers of two videos for sale through Witness.org—Garifunas Holding Ground and When the River met the Sea, the last made in Santa Rosa de Aguan after Hurricane Mitch.

Balbina Chimilio was also one of the singers in Club Wabaragoun in the CD of Garifuna music recorded by Radio France who sold it in France as Les chansons des Caraibes Nories (The songs of the BlackCaribs) and which sold in Honduras as Club Wabaragoun--Cultura Garifuna 100%.

 Honduran Garifuna poet Antonieta Maximo has also published recently a book of poems “Duda” (doubt) in Spanish in Honduras. She is only the second Afro-Honduran woman to publish a book of poetry in Honduras. She is the sister of Norma Maximo, a bilingual newspaper editor who also lives in the Greater Atlanta area in northern Fulton County, near her son who works in insurance.

Like Sabas Whittaker,, Norma and Antonieta Maximo had one parent, their mother, who was a Black English speaker of Gran Caymanian descent and their father was a Garifuna from the community of Masca, near Puerto Cortes, Honduras. Antonieta Maximo also has a CD of music she has composed called Nostalgia and her play about human trafficking was made into a video about the subject.

 

UN and Local Countries’ Support for Human Rights Struggles and Development for Indians and Afro-Descent People Differ

By Wendy Griffin

In 2011, Honduras’s Garifuna organization ODECO and the Central American Black Organization (CABO in English, ONECA in Spanish) were the hosts of the First World Summit of Afro-Descent people in La Ceiba, Honduras which has in its urban area approximately 5,000 Garifunas and over 1,000 black English speakers according to the 2001 Ethnic Census results published by Dr. William Davidson in 2011.  The Secretary of the organization of the First World Summit was Celeo Alvarez, a Honduran Garifuna who has a degree in Agricultural Economics and is the founder of ODECO and CABO.

According to the book published in Honduras in bilingual form (Spanish and English) about the First World Summit of Afro-Descent People, 800 delegates came representing 40 countries. The Summit was held at the installations of the branch campus of Honduran public university UNAH  in La Ceiba, which is known as CURLA.

At the end of the conference a proclamation was issued by the delegates which is available for free online in Spanish on the website of the Honduran Ministry of Indian Peoples and Afro-Hondurans (SEDINAFRO) and which is in the new book in bilingual form in the new book. During the activities leading up to the Summit, the organizers were able to get the UN to declare 2011 the International year of Afro-Descent People and as a result of the Proclamation were able to get declared the UN Decade of the Afro-Descent People. This is modeled after similar programs for Latin American Indians  whose human rights struggles leading up to 1992, and the counter celebrations to the 500^th  Anneversary of the Contact of Two Worlds on Columbus Day 1992 sponsored by Spain in the Dominican Republic, had resulted in new Human rights agreements at the International level, new laws and in some cases new constitutions regarding Indian rights and significant levels of funding for programs for Indians

This Summit and the UN Declaration of the Decade of the Afro-Descent People has not resulted in the UN being active in fighting for the rights of Afro-Descent People anywhere, and the levels of funding available for new programs for Afro-Descent People has not been anywhere close to what it was for Indigenous Peoples during their decade. The UN Decade of AfroDescent People begins January 2015.

In Honduras the situation of most Afro-Hondurans-Miskito Indians, Garifunas, and Black English speakers has gotten significantly worse since the 2011 Summit, and under the newly elected president of Honduras Juan Orlando Hernandez who has been changing the Honduran constitution in ways to make possible taking away a lot of their lands, it is expected to much worse very fast. Some of these Afro-Hondurans who may lose their lands are US citizens as Garifunas often took out US citizenship while working in the US legally for 35 or 40 years and then they return home to Honduras where they own lands and homes near the North Coast. Many Afro-Hondurans have family members in the US who help provide income to those back home.

Also disquieting are reports from activists in the countries, that some governments like Argentina, prefer to maintain the myth that they are primarily or exclusively, white countries, rather than accept funding for programs to benefit their Afro-descent populations.

We do not have look much farther than the fact that Tango, the most famous Argentinian dance, is of Afro-Argentinian inspiration or the fact that there are speakers of Kriol in Argentina, the mixed African and Spanish/Portuguese language that developed on the Cape Verde islands where the Portuguese put together different groups of Africans to wait for their deportation to Latin America, to note that Afro-Argentinians existed. There is a new movie available through third World Newsreel out of New York city about the  Afro-Argentinians Dr. Reid Andrews has a historical book on the Afro-Argentininas of Buenos Aires.