Garifuna Day Celebrations include Politics and Culture

Garifuna Day Celebration in  Limon, Colon included Politics and Culture

By Wendy Griffin (2013)

According to Celeo Alvarez Casildo, the President of the Garifuna NGO ODECO (Organization for Community Development), Honduras is the only country in Latin America which has a whole month dedicated to celebrating its Afro-Latino heritage. ODECO began its celebration of African Heritage Month in La Ceiba, on 1 April, but the big national celebration was held in the Garifuna community Limon, Colon this year.

 

As in La Ceiba, the celebrations in Limon began at the beginning of April and culminated in a huge celebration with thousands of people attending from all around Honduras, the US, Belize and Guatemala the 12^th of April, which is officially Garifuna Day in Honduras.  This holiday commemorates the arrival of the Garifunas on April 12, 1797 from St. Vincent from which they were exiled after losing a second war with the British who wanted the Garifunas’s land for planting sugarcane and to avoid losing slaves in Barbados who escaped in the night on rafts to find refuge with the Garifunas.

 

National Garifuna Day celebrations, held in a different Honduran Garifuna community each year since 1997,  include many cultural acts, but also political manuevering both by the Garifunas who are the hosts of the celebration and the Honduran political authorities who arrive to help celebrate. Both the colourful cultural celebrations with many dances in colourful costumes and the presence of Honduran political authorities which this year included the President of Honduras Pepe Lobo and his Council of Ministers as well as local authorities help ensure that there is a lot of media coverage of the National Garifuna Day events by the national Honduran press-TV, radio, and newspaper reporters were present in abundance.

 

The cultural parts of the celebration were beautiful.  In the evenings of 10, 11, and 12 April the Garifuna musical group Libaña Maraza (The grandchildren of Marasa) played for hours to a packed and appreciative audience who were beautifully attired.

 

On April 11, Garifuna artist Cruz Bermudez of the art gallery El Aura in front of Villas Telamar in Tela was the sole artist with an exposition.  However, on 12 April for the main event, a number of Garifuna artisans exhibited too in the soccer field including Trujillo painter Lino Alvarez, jewelery maker Ruddy from Santa Fe, a woman selling beautiful well made clothes she made of cotton with Afro-centric styles like the diashiki shirt (this style of shirt is used by Garifuna men in a dugu) from Puerto Cortes among others.  Garifuna small businesses, some of whom were helped by the Secretary of Honduran Indian and Afro-Hondurans, also exhibited like a coconut candy company from Limon, a tilapia fish raising project from Santa Rosa de Aguan, and a new Garifuna restaurant in Trujillo on the road to Santa Fe, Restaurante Kike.

 

Garifuna food and drink flowed abundantly.  Some people sold machuca—mashed boiled plantain with coconut soup and fried fish.  Others served cow stomach soup (sopa de mondogo), a dish popular with many Hondurans. The Garifuna medicinal wine guifiti, made with distilled and fermented sugar cane juice and herbs, among other specialities were available.  In Limon’s central park North Coast fast food specialities like baleadas (wheat flour tortillas with refried beans and Honduran cream) and “pastels” (pies filled with shark meat)  were sold by Garifuna women from different communities, such as Limon and Trujillo.

 

On both the 11^th and the 12^th, there were processions in the streets with Garifuna drumming, dancing, and singing.  At dawn on the 12^th, there was a re-enactment of the Garifunas arriving by canoe, which commemorates both the arrival of Garifunas to Honduras and reminds us of the ancestors arriving by canoe at the largest Garifuna ancestor ceremony, the dugu. 

 

On the 12^th of April, an outdoor Garifuna mass was held led by the Bishop of Trujillo, Luis Solé in Central Park. A Garifuna mass differs from the mass in Spanish in that Bible readings are done in Garifuna, plus the music is sung in Garifuna and accompanied by Garifuna musical instruments.  Some of the religious music of the Garifuna mass has special dances that accompany it.  The songs were composed in Belize, where a Garifuna rose to be the Bishop of Belize, which helped lead to incorporation of Garifuna in the Mass. This is a big change in Catholic church policy, which into the 1900’s had a mandate to extinguish the Indian languages, and into the 1960’s did not permit even Spanish in the mass.

 

Prior to the main events on the 11^th and 12th, the Garifunas of Limon organized presentation of less frequently danced dances like Maypole and Moors and Christians (Tiras). They also hosted a traditional Garifuna storytelling (uraga) night.  Few men know uragas any more. Garifuna traditional stories often have a sung chorus in them, something common to West African story telling as well.  On the radio they did programs like the history of the Garifunas in Honduras and the life story of Dr. Alfonso Lacayo, the first Garifuna doctor whose descendants are still important in Limon.  Beauty pageants were held in Limon to determine who would be Miss Limon for the Garifuna Day event. Hondurans traditionally considered Blacks ugly, and I have heard people yell “fea” (ugly girl) at young Garifuna girls in the street, but Garifunas choose to celebrate the beauty of their young women and young children at various times of the year including Garifuna Day.  

 

In Garifuna communities all over Honduras, cultural events took place in the early part of April such as talks in schools about Garifuna culture and history and dance presentations by students.  Many Garifuna schools organized groups of students to go to Limon, such as from the Santa Fe high school, the Trujillo Normal School, and the Garifuna students in the new Intercultural Agriculture program at the National Agricultural University, Catacamas, Olancho.  Non-Garifuna students also organized trips to Limon for the Garifuna Day celebration, such as anthropology students of the UPN in Santa Rosa de Copan.

 

 This represents a huge change in educational policy from the 1960’s when Garifuna students were physically punished and humiliated for speaking Garifuna in school.    

Honduran school textbooks still have little mention of the Garifunas or other Honduran Indians or Afro-Hondurans or pictures of blacks, but the extensive press coverage of Garifuna Day events,  a few well distributed books like Ramon Rivas’s book on Honduran Indians and Garifunas, and access to the Internet has made Hondurans more aware of the Garifunas’ presence, history, and culture. For example, one student said on the Internet for several days prior to this year’s  Garifuna Day event, there were reports from previous year’ Garifuna Day events available, which he looked at even though he was Ladino.

 

It is a victory and accomplishment of many years of political struggle that the President and his Council of Ministers leave Tegucigalpa and come to a Garifuna community without a paved road, like Limon. (Only a few years ago Limon got electricity.)  Many Hondurans would like to have a Council of Ministers in their town, noted ODECO president Celeo Alvarez Casildo. In fact, none of the other Honduran ethnic groups had managed to have the Council of Ministers visit them, even though there are significantly more Lencas than Garifunas, but in the final years of Pepe lobo's presidency he took his council of Ministers to the Lenca area of Gracias, Lempira, to the Maya Chorti indian area of Copan Ruinas, and an unprecedented trip of he and his council of Ministers to the Honduran Mosquitia in Puerto Lempira. To my knowledge this is the first ever trip by a Honduran President to the Honduran Mosquitia where 91% of the population belongs to a minority group with its own language--the Miskitos, the Garifunas, the Pech, and the Tawahkas. The occasion was the presentation of the first ever history book on the Honduran Mosquitia by a Miskito Indian Scott Wood La Moskitia desde Adentro (The Mosquitia from the Inside) published by the Honduran government's Ministry of Culture, Arts, and Sports. The Minister of Culture at the time was Dr. Tulio Mariano Gonzalez, a Garifuna from Trujillo with a Doctorate in Tree Science from a university in the Soviet Union.  

 

The benefits of the visit were felt before the celebration began.  Shortly before Garifuna Day, a local Ladino man described the unpaved highway connecting Limon to Bonito Oriental as “suffering and misery” which had been ruined by the heavy use of drug trafficers travelling to connect to the main North Coast road. While the President arrived in helicopter, the Ministers arrived by truck, and for them, the highway was scraped and regraded.  “They should have Garifuna Day every month if it helps the road”, joked one Ladino driver.

 

There was a chance during the ceremonies with the Honduran President and the Council of Ministers for the Garifunas of Limon to present their list of petitions which had been agreed on by an assembly of the town a month before the celebration. The Garifunas from all over the North Coast who had met in Limon  in General Assembly for two days before Garifuna Day also had the chance to present petitions to the President and his Ministers. 

 

The President did not come empty handed.  In the park in Limon, Ladinos from communities outside of Limon like Hicotea lined up to receive cash payments called “bonos” which are supposed to help poor parents keep their children in school, as opposed to sending them to work or keeping them home to help in the house.  These “bonos” were given out the next day in Trujillo.  It was very noticeable in Trujillo, that the hundreds of people who lined up in the park to get “bonos” were all Ladinos.  I did not see one Garifuna in the line.  The Pech of Silin and of Moradel were invited to Limon to receive 100 backpacks for school children, but did not receive “bonos” either.

 

People had mixed feelings about the arrival of the President and the Council of Ministers to Limon and the big cultural celebration.   One Garifuna man said, “I am tired of dancing.  What about other issues like land, jobs, crime, etc.?”

 

Another Garifuna man said, “I guess it is a good thing that at least once a year the politicians come and see how we live and lie to us.  But wouldn’t it be better if they came to inaugurate some type of public project?”  Another man said, “It is nice they graded the road, but wouldn’t it just be cheaper to actually pave it, instead of scraping and regrading it every year?”  After cold fronts or hurricanes, this dirt road becomes impassable, causing crisis because the green banana trucks can not get to the communities.

 

Beyond the community of Limon where the event was held, lie 10 Garifuna communities in the “muncipio” or county of Iriona and in the Mosquitia.  “Isn’t odd or sad that now in the twenty first century the whole “muncipio” of Iriona has no electricity?  It is hard to extend communications like cellphones, or Internet without basic things like electricity.  It affects their development,” said one Ladino man.  It was definitely hard to run the Garifuna NGO in Sangrelaya in the muncipio of Iriona, APROSA, because how do you contact them with no electricity, no phone service, no mail service and no bank? I have similar problems coordinating with the Pech organizations and teachers who live in similar circumstances.

 

It was a very powerful message to this Honduran President and his Ministers that thousands of Garifunas came out in the hot sun and listened to them because the Garifuna leaders who organized the event, and there were a number of them,  asked the people to come.  Very few people in the Garifuna communities have “poder convocatoria”, the ability to get people to come to a meeting just because they received an invitation or “convocatoria” signed by that person or organization. But unfortunately just because this President has come to hear the Garifunas and share some time with them, does not mean that the next Honduran president who takes office in January of next year will change the proposal to implement the Charter or Model Cities whether it negatively impacts the Garifuna or no.

 

I asked a Ladino reporter who was covering the Garifuna Day event why the Honduran government, particularly Juan Orlando, the current head of the Nationalist Party and President of the Congress and candidate as the next Honduran President, is pushing so hard for Model Cities, to the extent of firing the Supreme Court, running through unpopular new laws,  and possibly having to change the Constitution. He said, “While Model Cities may be bad for some people, they are good for Honduras, because they would bring jobs to two million Hondurans who are without work, many of whom now rob to have something to eat.” 

 

 Nothing seems to have changed since the days of the banana concessions when the Honduran government gave the lands of Ladinos, Garifunas, and Indians to the foreign owned banana companies, so that the foreign investors would build infrastructure, create jobs, and bring “development”. OFRANEH, the main Garifuna ethnic federation whose leaders were noticeably absent from the Garifuna Day event in Limon, calls this “false development”.  What is “development” if it does not include the respect of Human Rights for all the citizens?  

 

While people have mixed reactions about the spending of money for a big national event with the President and Ministers present, all the Garifunas I talked to are happy that Garifuna Day exists.  One Garifuna teacher said, “I think Garifuna Day is a good thing.  Before you never saw Garifunas dress up in traditional clothes for a special day.”  In Honduran popular culture, Blacks are seen as “bad” reported one ODECO lawyer to the General Assembly in Limon.  For many years Garifuna youth were embarrassed or ashamed to be Black and Garifuna.  Now they see their culture and history and traditional clothes, music and dance on TV.

 

The struggle for special days to celebrate Garifuna culture started in Belize with the late T.V. Ramos, and Belize’s Settlement Day, which is in November and is a National Bank holiday,  was the model for Honduras’s Garifuna Day celebrations. The Guatemalan Garifunas have also fought for and received a special Garifuna Day in their country. In New York City, where there are an estimated 100,000 Garifunas there is a Garifuna American Heritage Month, which ends 12 April.  T.V. Ramos who was born in Honduras where his father worked for the banana companies, is reported to have said his fight was inspired by the late Marcus Garvey and his United Negro Improvement Association. 2014 marked the 100th annevesary of the death of Marcus Garvey but his dreams continue to inspire Garífunas in Central America and in the US, but also Austrailian Aborigines who Heard of his work through the West Indian sailors they met while unloading the ships on Austrailian docks. UNIA set a misión to Honduras to the Garífunas and West Indians working between Puerto Cortes and La Ceiba, reported Dr. Jorge Amaya Banegas.

 

US Blacks also included in their demands during the Civil Rights movement special days to remember Black contributions to US society and that is how Black history Month (February) and Martin Luther King Day in January were started.  Garifunas also have fought for other symbolic victories like statues and plaques to Garifuna leaders like Dr. Alfonso Lacayo in La Ceiba and Chief Satuye. There are also buildings named after Chief Satuye, like the ODECO building in La Ceiba and the Satuye Police Post on the highway outside of La Ceiba, similar to the many boulevards and streets named after Martin Luther King in the US.. Even in St. Vincent, there is a plaque to commemorate where Chief Satuye, the leader of the Garifuna resistance, was killed by the British in 1796.

 

Some Garifuna leaders to show their pride in their culture give their children special names like Africa, the daughter of Minister of Culture Dr. Tulio Mariano Gonzales, and Ashanti, a Garifuna dancer and the daughter of the choreographer of the National Garifuna Folkloric Ballet and Garifuna author Crisanto Melendez. Ashanti is named for an African tribe in Ghana, and some change in people’s perceptions can be seen that now there are many young Honduran girls named Ashanti. These types of changes were also seen in the US after the Civil Rights movement when many Blacks gave Afro-centric names to their children. In Iriona, many Garifunas still give traditional Garifuna names to their children, particularly the girls.