Witchcraft stories and How they Affected Interethnic Relationships in Honduran Banana Port Towns

Exchanges of Traditional  Information about Witchcraft, Dealing with Ghosts, Traditional medicine, and Concerns about Witchcraft in Interethnic Relations in Banana Town Ports,

 By Wendy Griffin January 2015

Even though the Garifunas and Mestizos considered that the Black English speakers of Honduras were often witches, the Garifunas did consult Black English speaking midwives, witches, healers (curandero/curandera) and spiritists. There is a Garifuna song that says “Don’t tell my neighbor a English speaking Black woman that I am sick. I think she has something to do with this illness.”  Doña Sasa said she would spy on her neighbors in Puerto Castilla and one of the English speaking Black women had a crystal ball. One day she saw the woman in front of the crystal ball with the slip of another woman.  The next day the woman was dead.

 

Garifunas believe that some types of mal are done taking something that belongs to the other person and through this the mal reaches the other person to whom the garment belonged. Doña Luisa a Garifuna woman  who suffered from dizziness, vertigo, and a buzzing sound consulted both regular doctors and traditional healers. The healer, I believe a Ladino, asked if something of hers was missing, She said, one of her head scarves had been stolen. He said the other person was using it to do mal and charged her a lot of money to cure her. In fact, she paid the money, but she was not cured.

 

Yaya said, In the past if you went out your children were fine. You came back, someone had given them poison and they were dead.  Doña Sasa tells of an example that happened to a boy from Puerto Castilla about 16 years old. She and the boy were coming on the train from Puerto Castilla to Trujillo.  They got off in Barrio Rio Negro and were walking. Someone stopped them and said Don’t you want some sugarcane? They were hot and thirsty from the trip, but Doña Sasa said, “No thank you I ate at home.”  The boy accepted the sugarcane. On the walk between Barrio Rio Negro and Barrio Cristales, about 10 minutes along the beach, the boy died of being poisoned. His parents had to come to bury him. It was totally unexpected—he had just gone to Trujillo to do an errand.

 

 One example of Garifunas consulting a Black English speaking witch was told to me by Garifuna Sebastian Marin.  His sister lived in the Tela Railroad Company housing in Tela.  Her husband was a sailor with their shipping lines.  Her husband was coming home and she took a shower before he came.  There were three families which shared the same bathroom in the company housing.  After she got dressed, she realized that her wedding ring, which she had taken off to take a shower, was missing.  She went back to the bathroom, but it was not there.  She went to the neighbors’ houses of the two families who shared the bathroom and asked about her ring.  They had not seen it they said.  She was worried her husband would be very angry with her for losing the ring.  Sebastian was visiting her.  Together they went to consult a Black English speaking witch.  He said someone had her ring, and at that moment he was trying to sell it.  But he would not be able to sell it, and if he did manage to sell it, he would suffer from “mal” (witchcraft) that no healer would be able to heal him of it.  So they went home.

 

About an hour later, one of the neighbors who had said he did not have the ring, said, “Here is your accursed ring,” and threw it at her and stomped off.

 

Suzanne Brown, a Black English speaker of Belizean origin from Puerto Castilla, said her grandfather was a witch. In New York, Garifunas consult Santo Dominicans, Haitians, even East Indians (Hindues) as well as Garifuna witches to do curses on people in New York, but even in Honduras, or to tie a man so that he will not be unfaithful to the woman or leave her.  My Garifuna friend Sebastian Marin called this last type of witchcraft “hoo-doo”, and in Honduras it is practiced by Garifuna witches (men and women), Bay Islanders, Ladinos, Miskitos, and even Maya-Chorti.

 

Yaya once had a dream of a tall candle and a short candle in a person’s home. These type of tall candles the Garifunas use during the novenario or nine days of prayers when a person has died.  She told her friends about the dream. Later that day her friends came and said “Jesus, what a dream. Your son Rudi is dying in La Ceiba.” She went to Glynn’s and bought a airplane ticket to La Ceiba. She took her son to a healer/witch. She said his wife had given something to tie him to her, that was what was making him sick. She gave him something to drink as a purge. He said in my house we are accostumed to drink something to purge ourselves, but this looks very strong. They went home and Yaya convinced him to drink it. He was in the bathroom for hours and in the end was so weak he needed to take something else for a month as reconstitutive. 

 

Many Garifuna men will leave their wives or girlfriends if they find out that they are giving them something to tie them to them. For example, Herman Alvarez left a girlfriend who went to a Dominican to get something to tie him to her. Yaya’s son and his wife are still together in spite of this crisis. Ladina women still today consult Garifuna women in Trujillo who do the ceremony to tie a man to them.  A Ladina woman whose husband was tied to some other woman went to a Ladino male witch to get the “contra” or remedy to solve the problem.  She did it, but her husband paced the house and would walk to the door but not go out, and seemed very distraught. She undid the “contra”, and within minutes he walked out the house to see the other woman so she knew it was true. This type of witchcraft used to be hidden, but now it is so open that three people advertise in the La Tribuna newspaper in Tegucigalpa that they can solve these types of love problems. Yaya who is a buyei was taught how to do these love charms by a friend who was a Ladina witch, but she considers this type of witchcraft “porquería” (something dirty like pigs) and did not practice it. She also did not do poisons, another thing that witches did, although she has treated people for “mal” witchcraft.

 

There have been Garifuna witches in the past who used poisons. Mindula was a female witch in Santa Fe.  One example of a story told about her is that she made some coconut breads and gave them to the grandparents of an older man in Trujillo. They ate part of the coconut breads at night and planned to eat the rest of the coconut breads in the morning, but they were dead by morning. The Garifunas of Trujillo and Santa Fe got tired of her evil doing and a Garifuna in New York went to a Hindu to have a Curse “mal” put on her. She was walking along the beach between Santa Fe and Trujillo when she saw a gringo. Then a ball of fire came out from the sea and caught her on fire. She called and called for garlic, to stop the mal but no one would help her and she died. 

 

One of the songs on the Casette Lanigui Garifuna tells about there is a curse “mal” coming from New York  it is going to pass by Haiti, and then it is coming to kill me. There is another Garifuna song about how I will dead in three days from mal.

 

Herman Alvarez had a nephew who went to Belize to work. His nephew raped the daughter of some Black English speakers in Belize. The police put him in jail, but the parents of the girl asked for him to be set free and sent back to Honduras. The police did that. A few days he got sick. Herman Alvarez went to visit him. He said the boy no longer had a penis, he had a vulva like a young girl. Shortly after that the boy died. Said Herman, “Mal exists”.  Women who think their husband is cheating on them can also pay to have mal affect the other woman. There was a Garifuna woman in Trujillo who became crazy and would walk through the street and take her clothes off. The other Garifunas would say someone did mal to her because of a conflict over men.

 

Garifunas would also consult a spiritist for example if they saw the spirit of a person who was dead (ufiyú in Garifuna) walking around.  These spiritists knew how to find out what the person who was an ufiyu wanted to.  In one case in Cristales, a Garifuna woman had left 6 cents in her “gadauri” (a basket weaving used to carry produce from the fields) and she wanted her family to know about it, so she appeared to Garifunas in Cristales. The other Garifunas consulted the spiritist to find out what the ufiyú wanted.  The ufiyu told the spiritist.  After the family found the money she had left for them, she never appeared again  They think this spiritist as a Black English speaker. The Miskitos, the Garifunas and the Bay Islanders all agree that pending money issues or buried treasure can cause a spirit to linger instead of going to the land of the ancestors (Garifunas) or the land of the rain spirit (Miskitos).  Spiritists could also diagnose what another person had done to cause one to be sick from witchcraft “mal”.       

 

Black English speaking Bush doctors (curanderos), witches (brujos), and spiritists (espiritistas) are rare in Honduras now given the overwhelming influence of Protestant churches among Bay Islanders and other English speaking Blacks. But they were important before.  For example, still in 1950, the only medical care available on the Bay Island of Roatan was a Jamaican naturalist doctor, Bay Islander bush doctors, and the Garifuna curanderos or healers with medicinal plants.

 

A Garifuna woman in Batalla, across the river from the Ladino town of Palacios, in the Mosquitia, had a dream about William Pitt, the English founder of the English community of Black River in the 1700’s whose tomb is still visible in Palacios. In the dream he told her where his silver was buried.  She woke up and went to where he said and dug it up.  She found over 100 old British pound sterling coins (known as esterlina in Spanish). The Honduran authorities heard about it and came and took them away.  They displayed them in the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington, DC.  After a while the Garifunas began to make demands to have the coins back.  The government never did give the coins back, but they did agree to build the Health Center in Batalla in exchange. That is the origin of the Centro de Salud in Batalla.

 

The Obeah Man ring play done by Black English speakers in La Ceiba tells about another type of curse, known as the True Name curse.  In the song there is a young girl who is sick, and the mother takers her to the Obeah man. The Obeah man tells her that she should turn the girl around, slap her on the back, and change her name to Luisiana. By changing her name, it breaks the curse.

 

Garifunas also believed that your enemies could plant a certain type of plant called tunantai in Garifuna which would make you get lost in the mountains.  The key to not becoming lost is to look out for this plant, and when you see it, to say, “Ya te veo” (I already see you). Garifuna buyeis and healers, especially male buyeis and curanderos, can treat problems caused by tunantai.

 

Not only do Black English speakers and Garifunas consider that there are often withes within the other ethnic group, there have also traditionally been bad feelings between Garifunas and Miskito Indians, because the Miskitos consider the Garifunas grandes hechiceros (big sorcerers who do curses) and the Garifunas consider the Miskitos are the same. For example, the Miskitos say if you try to steal the fruits of a Garifuna in his field, you will end up helping him instead.

 

The Garifunas admit that in the past, there were Garifuna men who knew how to do things to treat their crops to stop people from stealing them. For example, one Garifuna man was reportedly able charm snakes so that if people climbed up his coconut trees to steal coconuts, the snake would be waiting for them at the bottom of the tree when the thief wanted to come down. Once he went out to see who the snake had cornered up in the tree, and it was his own children stealing coconuts. Among some other Afro-Latin American groups like the Djuka, snake magic is also important. Among Garifunas, only men have been reported using this type of magic, which might be one reason why Garifuna men traditionally cleared fields for their wives, in that they also put down certain protections for the crops.  Sometimes in the Garifuna culture, snakes represent ancestors. For example, if you see a snake in a wood pile, maybe it is the sign that an ancestor is asking for a ceremony.  If you ignore the sign of the snake, worse things like sickness and bad dreams will happen to you until you do the ancestor ceremony that the ancestor wants.

 

Garifunas reportedly sometimes paid witches to kill people through curses if the other person had stolen from them.  One Garifuna man sold scarves. His mother’s friends said to her, didn’t your son give you a scarf? No, said the mother, but I could take one if I wanted one. So the mother took a scarf.  When the man saw that a scarf was missing, he asked his aunt and his mother if they had taken the scarf, but they said, “No.” So the man went out and paid a witch to go and find out who had taken the scarf.  The witch said, it was taken by the one you love best in the world. The man said, I want you to kill the person who stole the scarf. The witch did the spell, and the man’s mother died. He went crazy when he realized that he had had his own mother killed. Doña Sasa who told the story said, the man told him it was the one who he loved the most which was either going to be his mother or his child. If something is lost in the house, it probably best just to let it go.

 

Yaya has lost only one woman in childbirth, but that childbirth was complicated by “mal”. The woman and her husband had stolen money her father had from his employer, which they used to buy flour to make coconut bread to sell. The father did not know who had stolen the money, so he paid someone to put a curse on them. The woman dreamed before she had labor that she was going to die from this birth. When she had the baby the placenta would not come down. After the midwife could not help her, they took her in a hammock to a regular doctor, but after trying for several hours, the placenta would not come down and the woman died. Yaya said, she should have told the truth and said I took the money.

 

Doña Sasa said that Honduran President Carias stopped all these murders (matacina) in the Trujillo area. Maybe she felt that the deportation of the Black English speakers cut down on the murders caused by witchcraft.  Carias also established a curfew, and had soldiers patrolling the city, and everyone remembers how safe it was under President Carias (as long as you were not against him politically).

 

Among Garifunas buyeis also find lost things, and even people who are not Garifunas will consult them. For example, a Ladino man had lost something and he and his friend Geovanni went to see Yaya. Yaya told them that an acquaintance of the man had what he was looking for, and the man had one leg shorter than the other. The man said that he had an acquaintance like that. He went to the man’s house, and the man had the thing he was looking for.

 

There were also reportedly Garifunas who knew secrets how to call the murderer of someone. One Garifuna teacher was murdered in Trujillo. A few days later the murderer turned himself in saying that everything he looked at looked like blood. The story of Cousin Sebastian is about how Cousin Sebastian was called back to the wake after he murdered his cousin for money that they were saving together, and when he showed up his eyes glowed red, showing his guilt.

While Garifuna buyeis make amulets of red cloth with herbs inside for protection from unhappy or evil spirits that Garifunas wear as either a bracelet or a necklace, and they can recommend plants to carry to avoid being attacked by an enemy either by mal or by physical force, and they can recommend plants that if you carry them they attract good luck or good sales, and they do baths to wash away bad luck and bring good luck, their functions are quite different from witches in the Garifuna community.

 

The mutual mistrust of Garífunas and Miskitos as grandes hechiceros seems to be a factor in why there are Garífuna village after Garífuna village and then they stop and then it is Miskito  village after Miskito village. They are not intermixed except in the last Garífuna village of Plaplaya. Garífuna-Miskito marriages are also not common.  When couples of Garífuna men and Miskito women do form, the other Garífunas counsel "las sambas son fregadas"(Miskito women are complicated or difficult), because they often do something drastic if the man is unfaithful to her or leaves her. The use of plants by Miskito women in their romantic relationships has been well documented by anthropologist Laura Herlihy who sees it as a way of exercising agency in a situation of extreme economic dependence.

The Miskito Dance "Enamorando las Muchachas" (Getting the Girls to Fall in Love with you) shows that traditional Miskito boys also went to the sukya or shaman to get plants to get the girl of their choice to fall in love with them. The dance, described in David Flores's Evolución Historica de la  Danza Folklorica Hondureña", is divided into three parts. First the girls are washing clothes in the river and the boys come and bother them, and the girls wave them off as if to tell them go away. The boys go to the shaman and get herbs. In the last part the Miskito boys and girls are shown "abrazados", taking each other by the arms and being married by the sukya.  Both Tawahkas and Miskitos do this dance.

Being affected by witchcraft and being healed of witchcraft is sometimes part of the life story of Honduran traditional healers.  My Garífuna friend Yaya was affected by witchcraft by Ladinos who threw dirt from the cemetary on her bed causing her to become ill and she was later cured by a remedy revealed in dreams by her grandmother, after which she became a healer with plants. She said before that she was not much interested in medicinal plants. 

My Pech friend Juana Carolina Hernández Torres who is a midwife and healer also was affected by witchcraft "Mal" when she fell into a hole in the Mosquitia, and after she was cured,  she studied about medicinal plants, but was also able to diagnose illnesses.  Even though her sister took the same classes, she was not able to be able to diagnose illnesses like feel the little balls in the blood that are a sign of "empacho".  Doña Juana says it is a gift "un don" that she has.  That traditional healers are first sick themselves, is a common trope among traditional healers worldwife.     

Many traditional Hondurans believe that illnesses are caused by witchcraft, even though modern science assigns them different names like lupus or cataracts.  Believing that your illness is caused by witchcraft often causes a lot of stress for the person, because they ask themselves, Why if I have been good to the other people, why would they do something bad like witchcraft to me?  One reason most Honduran Indians and Garífunas do not try to accumulate a great deal of personal wealth, is that if you do, other people will feel envy and possibly contract a witch to take vengeance on you. 

A good buyei or other shaman will tell you when they believe they can not cure you or do not know what you have, but some traditional people go from person to person trying to find a cure for what they believe is witchcraft and in the end the only result is that they are poorer than when they began the search for better health, which troubles them even more.  However, the same is also often true for people trying to find health from Western style medicine as well. Both Yaya and Doña Juana got well from the illnesses that witchcraft by others caused them. Doña Juana was cured by a Miskito female healer who said, "It was a good thing you came today, because three days later, you would have been dead."  Doña Juana  says , "Because of this Miskito healer Doña Hipolita I am alive today, here with my family."