Garifuna Women’s Dance Groups and Similarities with Ghanan Women’s Dance Clubs

Garifuna Women’s Dance Groups and Similarities with Ghanan Women’s Dance Clubs

By Wendy Griffin January 2015

When my now deceased Garifuna friend Profesor Fausto Miguel Alvarez first showed the book he was writing The Garifunas at the End of the 20th Century, one of the things that struck me was that every Garifuna community had a Garifuna Women’s Dance Club, and often between three and five dance clubs. In the telling of the Histories of Corozal and Sambo Creek which the Garifunas of GariTV.com made, the history of these dance clubs and the singing of the dance clubs loom large.

The names of the Women’s Dance Clubs often have deep meanings that reflect something about the Garifuna culture or social situation.  One dance club was called Lagrimas, Tears, because every year someone is in mourning. Many Garifuna songs, like the woman who speaks in front of the church in Sambo Creek, talk about how we are on Earth only for a moment and then we are gone. This is a fleeting existence,like the Mascaro dancer that appears in your garden on Christmas Day and then is gone.

The name of the Garifuna Women’s club in La Ceiba is “Mala Polia”. Polia in Honduran Spanish are insects that destroy things like termites or moths. The Hispanic Hondurans in La Ceiba made fun of the presence of the Garifunas in La Ceiba, and called them Mala Polia—Bad Devouring Insects. The Garifuna women chose to make this into their women’s dance club’s name and have snakes, worms, moths, bugs on their flag that they carry in front of the dance group when they enter a town or are going to sing including for putting clay on a house. In Trujillo, the Garifuna women’s dance club that was recorded for a CD by Radio France is called Wabaragóun—Let us all go forward together. The other dance clubs there were Los Tigres (The Tigers) and Mazapan (Breadfruit), but Mazapan no longer has any active members, so their club house is used by Club Wabaragóun.

There are women's dance groups that sing in Ghana which may be part of the origin of the Garifuna clubs. They wear uniforms similar to the Garifuna women’s uniforms in their dance clubs.  The Ghanian women’s dance clubs are the institution at the village level  which lead and organize the festivals. The president of the Ghanan Dance club is the  one who settles disputes in the community. Tete Cobbah a videographer in the Boston área from Ghana said that if there is a dispute, they say, "Let us go to the old woman", and this is who they are referring to.

The Garífuna women's dance clubs also serve these functions. They organize the celebration of the Patron Saint’s Fair and of Christmas. The President of the Garifuna women’s club is said to have the authority of a mayor in Garifuna communities, noted Trujillo Garifuna Dr. Tulio Mariano Gonzalez.  If women in the village have a dispute, they can go to the President of the Dance Club to help them resolve it.

 Among Afro- Caribbean men working away from their home communities, they were famous for forming benevolant societies which they used to pool their resources especially to meet the expenses of funerals. In Honduras this type of mutual aid association among Black English speakers was the origin of the Asociacion de la Tercera Edad (The Senior Citizen's Association) in Tela.

Among the Garífunas, it is actually the Garifuna Women's dance clubs that raise money by singing on New Year's day and singing and dancing from hosue to house singing parranda. This can be seen in the videos Historia de Sambo Creek and Historia de Corozal available from www.garistore.com  In this way, the club raises some cash for these funeral expenses of their members, especially to buy rum, coffee, etc. The topic of managing money is very sensitive among the Garífunas. A woman who can manage other Garífuna women's money as Club President for 10 years is probably a woman beyond reproach.

The members of the Garifuna women’s dance clubs also make in-kind contributions of the day of the death. Also they provide the music for you as a member if you or your family member dies, so that you will have a nice wake or end of one year of mourning ceremony. One of the best things you can say about someone was that he was so loved it was a great wake, and one of the worst things you can say is no one came, his family went to bed early, etc. Thus the singing of Garifuna women’s clubs at wakes helps to provide positive reenforcement to those who follow the norms of the community and to punish those who do not follow the norms.

The songs themselves sung by the Garifuna women’s dance clubs  which often criticize people or situations in the community also help serve this function. Women’s Parranda songs are sung before Christmas and sometimes at other times by visiting people from house to house, and people who want to call attention to some bad behavior in the community can organize that this song be sung at the offending person’s house.

Also the Garifuna women's dance clubs used to approve of new couples, and agree to haul wáter and sing punta while the men put up the clay walls and the leaves of the roof for the house of a couple that was just getting together. Then the women would cook, and they would sing and dance and celebrate the new couple in the evening and then they were married. The Young man had to do a number of things to prove he was worthy of a wife. If he did not do them, no one would help him build a house,niether his male relatives and freinds nor the women in the dance club and in his family. That system has pretty much broken down for a lot of reasons.  

 Also the women of the Garifuna dance club sing at ancestor ceremonies, and for their own members they sing free or at a reduced rate and also help to contribute with food for the ceremony, since the Garífuna women farmed. The Garífuna women's dance club also sing songs that they compose or others compose that critique what is going on in the community, like for Christmas they might sing the hunguhungu song about  my son moved to La Ceiba and now never thinks of his old mother.  Although Garifuna women dance clubs sing hunguhungu or fedu (meaning to celebrate or celebration) on 24 December/Christmas Eve, and 31 December/New Year’s Eve these songs have nothing to do with the celebration of Christmas. The fact that these dates correspond to the two  Celebration days of the African festival that is the origin of Kwanzaa in the US may be caused by both being of similar origins. I asked the Garífuna women in the dance clubs for whom they sing at Christmas and New Years and they said, "For ourselves." Hunguhungu is considered a secularized versión of dugu songs for the ancestors and is danced with steps similar to one of the dances of the dugu ceremony.  "For ourselves", might refer to Garífunas living now in the community, and those who have gone on as well.

 There also seemed to be special stories that only women told that taught certain values.  These are not told at wakes when men's stories the uraga are told. The Garifuna women of the dance club compose songs and also the ancestors reveal songs that will be healing to the person.  They can reveal them to anyone, or particularly to buyeis or shamans for ancestor ceremonies. These songs usually have messages in them.

The Garifuna women would also sing songs to their children when they were bad or when they were going on a long journey so that the children would remember the lesson.  I was told by Profesor Santos Angel Batiz that these groups of Garifuna women came together to sing in the form of a dance club evolved from the groups of women who planted yuca together and who often lent labor like they would share the peeling, the grating, the getting the liquid out of yuca, for cassava bread. The processes of working in the yuca field was usually accompanied by singing punta songs, and the process of grating yuca has its own special songs.

 Since the Garífuna women also sang punta songs when they worked in the fields, and in that way knew the words of the songs for the ceremonies,but they also learned the lessons of the songs,and the stories. There is often a buyei who is head of the dance club, but the president can also be a non buyei or shaman, and the female buyeis are usually members of the dance club, but often not its president.

 

I am told the head of a Garífuna female dance club is like the mayor, they frequently undertake work together even today. For example, the Garifuna Emergency Committee mostly organized their work out in the communities through groups of women organized first as dance clubs. The uniform and the way they stand in their dance club looks just like Houward Couwalder's photo of a Ghanan's women's dance club. The women of the dance clubs used to make small contributions of money to buy the materials to build their dance group’s house.  The story of the Mazapan (Breadfruit) dance group of Trujillo tells of the members bringing 50 centavos, and then another 50 centavos to get the money together to build their dance house that still stands. Some dance groups in Trujillo currently do not have their own dance house as materials have become very expensive.

Some Garífuna women's dance groups like in Tela área communities have managed to form a Younger person's auxiliary versión of their dance club, both females to sing and males to dance. This has not been possibly in Trujillo, although women's dance club members have taught 4 times the dance Moors and Christains which does not have words to Garífuna Young people. The Garífuna drummers in Trujillo of the Los Menudos (The Chitlerings) musical group are those who organize the younger boys to dance Mascaro for Christmas in Trujillo while the adult Mascaro dancers dance on New Year's Day. The Younger boys dance, but the singers are often over 90.  Some otherwise marginal Garifuna men in Trujillo who seem to have learning difficulties are actually highly valued in the community because one is a good second drummer and the other can sing Mascaro songs and is not too drunk to sing early on Christmas and New Year's Days, another example of alternative status systems.    

 

The Garífuna men had other leadership type roles in the community, but they were often away hunting or fishing or doing wage labor, and so the internal affiars of the vilalge were managed by the women, but the external affairs,diplomacy, war, meeting with people from strange villages like merchants who wanted to buy, the Garifuna men often handled them. The leadership roles of men in Garifuna society like Celeo Alvarez Casildo as head of ODECO (a Garifuna NGO) or the primarily male heads of the Garifuna patronatos (citizen committees) and the Comunidad de Cristales y Rio Negro of Trujillo continue this traditional type of male Garifuna leadership.  In Sarah England’s book on the Afro-Central Americans in New York she noted while she was in Limon, Honduras with a one and half year old baby, she just did not have the liberty to go out and attend meetings because she had to worry about nap times and feeding times of a small child. When Garifuna women meet to dance in their dance clubs, it is usually late at night, after 10 pm, until dawn, a time when they would not have other responsibilities in their homes or communities and their children were asleep.

 Both men and women sing at Garífuna ancestor ceremonies, but not together. The Garífuna men lean on a paddle when they sing the songs of old men arumajani. This type of paddle made of Stone  as seen in the Field Museum of Chicago was the symbol of power of the Arawak or Caribs. Stone ones have beenfound in archaeological ruins. This use of the canoe paddle as power symbol for men is also found among the Tulalip Indians here in the US who were also a fishing people.

 If the men wanted to haul canoes, they need to be well behaved, as a number of people have to help and women sang both canoe hauling songs and mahoghany cutting songs. If the man does not behave well, he will have no one to haul or to sing for him.

 Partly I am interested in the Ghanean women's dance clubs to see if they have similar functions, because I am interested in the loss of teaching of values among the Garífunas as the Young people do not hear the songs because they do not speak Garifuna, and also their lives have changed and so they do not need to be so well behaved because in the past they depended on the volunteer labor of others for example for ceremonies or builidng their houses. Now it is all about money. 

 Garifuna women’s dance clubs like the cofradías of the Lencas of Honduras were also part of an alternative status system. While Ladinos in Honduras may have looked down on Garifuna women for being farmers or for selling food or firewood from door to door, the Garifuna women who reached the level of Dance Club President knew that they were held in high regard by their Garifuna neighbors, and this helped form a positive self image, and was something the other women could aspire to.

 The women in the Garifuna dance club not only control their dancing during Christmas and the fair, but they also traditionally controlled which men could perform at this time, like who would be the Barbarian Indian (Indio Barbaro).  The Garifuna women of the dance club raise money, such as holding barbecues, to have money to pay for the male drummers on the special days of the year like Christmas Eve and New Years Eve and there is some honor in being chosen to be a certain dance group’s drummer, and dishonor in being asked not to drum because one is too drunk to drum. The Garifuna men used to form small dance theater groups to perform masked dances at Christmas like Curiapatia, as recently as 20 years ago, but these men groups have almost disappeared, except for Mascaro, and if these dances are done, they are done by the women of the Garifuna dance clubs. Besides immigration, the Garífuna men note the presence of spending free time with cable televisión instead of dancing is another reason why men's dancing groups have disappeared. Older Garifune men often return to Trujillo after 20 or 30 years of working as sailors or in the US or as teachers in Ladino communities in Honduras, but they did not grow up singing and dancing, and so do not feel comfortable taking up age appropriate positions in the community like singing arumajani, the songs of older men.

 The female leaders in the Garifuna women’s dance clubs also tend to be leaders in other local organizations including the Pastoral Garifuna of the Catholic Church, development NGO programs like of the Garifuna Emergency Committee of Honduras (CEGAH), and the assistants to the buyeis in Garifuna ceremonies.   Garifuna women’s dance club members and their male drummers are almost always present in modern protests such as about Garifuna land, even if the protest is in Tegucigalpa, 12 hours away by bus.

 I am also interested in the leadership roles of the Garifuna women’s dance clubs for legal reasons. The Garífunas may be denied protection of ILO Convention 169 because the Honduran government in its InterAmerican Human Rights Court case of the Garifunas of Triunfo de la Cruz vs. Honduras  argued in its written arguments presented June 2014 that the Garifunas are Blacks and that they are not Indians. However ILO convention 169 also covers tribal people who maintain their own traditional structures of authority and I think Hondurans because they are machista, and also because they were focusing on the warrior-diplomat role,of the Garífuna men, they did not notice the traditional structure of authority of the Garifuna women within their communities.

 The Garífuna women's dance clubs can not even get land titles to their own buildings because the Honduran government does not recognize them as legal organizations-- they do not have personaría jurídica or a coportate chárter, which would let them own land.  The Garífunas are literally in the InterAmerican Human Rights Court right now and this information about the relationship between Ghanan women's dance clubs and Garifuna women’s dance clubs might be key in getting them recognized as tribal people.

 This two tiered system of leadership was also known by some US Indian tribes such as the Lakota Sioux Indians, where there were Young men called captains or war captains who went out and fought, but the wise old people stayed home and adjudicated cases, kept the peace, said prayers, gave good advice to the Young and confused, studied traditional medicine, learned the oral literature and used its normative aspects to help make decisions,  etc.  In return, the Young people helped provide for these older counselors when they were old. In most Indian cultures of Central America, music and dance and those who carried them out were considered intrinsic parts of the religious and political structures of the communities.

Travelling to other communities’ events like the Garifuna women’s clubs visit each other during the fairs, are also part of the stories of what kept other widely dispersed Honduran Indian groups like Miskito Indians and Lenca Indians unified.  Visiting other communities because your family is having an ancestor ceremony there, is another way Garifuna women help to maintain the unity of the more than 50 Garifuna communities in Honduras and even ties to those in Guatemala and Belize. The Garífuna women's dance club of Livingston Guatemala has come to Trujillo, Honduras to sing and the Garífuna women's dance clubs of Trujillo have organized exursions to sing in Livingston, Guatemala. Before Hurricane Mitch, the Garífuna fair in Santa Rosa de Aguan was reportedly one that no one missed. 

 The important roles of Ghanan women are recorded in the oral literatura like Queen Ya. The story of Barauda of the Garífunas, the wife of Satuye, shown in the movie Garífuna in Peril, maybe a woman trying to follow the example of Queen Ya, who also said something similar like let me wear the pants and you men the skirts and disguised as women the male Warriors could get near to the British. This is the story behind the dance of Mascaro or The Dance of the Warriors (Wanaragua) among the Garifunas of Honduras, shown so beautifully in Garifuna in Peril. The music to which Wanaragua is danced to is the same as a dance from the Songhay (previously located north of Ghana) that the Atlanta African Dance group has presented.

My Garífuna friend Clara is known as Yaya, which Tete Cobbah from Ghana also said is a common way to call a girl born on Monday in Ghana, either Ya or Yaya. Some Garífunas in Belize also do the John Canoe dance, whose name comes from John Canby a slaver in Ghana and that is why it is done with a red Britsh military uniform and goes house to hosue threatening to steal the children. The dance Wanaragua in Honduras is often called Yan Canu, as the Spanish pronunciation of this dance. When the Honduran government issued a postage stamp in honor of the 200th Anneversary of the Garífunas arriving in Honduras, one of the stamps had a painting by Garífuna painter Peter Centeno called Yan Canu. 

 Yaya sang in dance clubs as a member, but it was her sister and later her niece that was the president of the Mazapan dance club in Trujillo. The male buyei who founded the Walagante dance club in Trujillo first learned all the dugu and chugu related songs from another male buyei, Santos, in Trujillo, and then from his dance group formed a group of women who could sing at ancestor ceremonies.  In Trujillo both the singers at the ancestor ceremonies and the drummers, as well as the buyeis and their assistances who play maracas are paid by the family organizing the dugu. It used to be in an extended family there were men who could drum and women who could sing, and this labor was contributed for free, like making the dugu house, but now that just a few handfulls of people know these skills in each community it is necessary to pay them, adding considerably to the cost of such ceremonies.

I don't know if Umojá in the African language Swahili refers to a similar institution of women who work together and sing together. Such institutions of women working copperatively together in farming do exist in Southern African tribes, too, such as in Kenya and Tanzania. In Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Umojá is a male African musical group from the Congo area and they dance a dance almost identical to punta of the Garifunas.

The most import song in the Garífuna ancestor ceremony is called Mali, and the verb is amalijani, to do the action of Mali. One origin story of the Garífunas  repeated in multiple sources is that they came from the old kingdom of Mali a long time before before Columbus came to the Americas. Some Garífuna historians even say Christopher Columbus took advantage of maps and navigators who knew the Mali route to the Americas. Watermelons are native to Africa, but are found in the Carib and Arawak área of South America before the end of the Precolubmian period. So the claim of the Garifunas that the Africans who mixed with the Caribs and Arawaks in St. Vincent were there before Columbus is not imposible. There are studies linking the Olmecs with their big Stone heads with big flat noses and big lips and inscriptions similar to the language of Manding people to pre-Columbian Africans, such as in Sabas Whittaker's Africans in the Americas. Wikipedia has maps of the old Songhay and Mali kingdoms in Western Africa.

The movies showing the dances and ceremonies and dance Garifuna dance clubs—El Espiritu de Mi Mama (dugu), Garifuna in Peril (punta, abaimajani, Mascaro or Wanaragua) are available at www.garifunainperil.com and Historia de Sambo Creek and Historia de Corozal (fedu or hunguhungu, Moors and Christians, chugu, women’s dance clubs with their flags) are for sale at www.Garitv.com or www.garistore.com.  A chugu also forms part of the Video “Tierra negra” on Youtube, a video by Telesur’s Causa Justa TV show about the land problems of the Garifunas related to the Model Cities or Ciudades Modelos (ZEDE).  Cd's that include women's dance clubs include Doris Zemurray Stone's CD of Songs of the Black Caribs (1954) which has the women's dance clubs from Trujillo-Puerto Castilla and Cortes, both ports used by her father's United Fruit Company. Also in Salvador Suazo's recordings on the cassette that accompanied Lanigi Garífuna (Garífuna Heart) song book was recorded by Garífuna women's dance club from Sangrelaya. Also the Radio France recording of Club Wabaragoun known in French as Les Chansons des Caraïbs Noires (Songs of the Black Caribs) is another examples of a CD of both religious and secular Garífuna music recorded by a Garífuna women's dance club.