Proud Black Heritage: How Cassava helped Garifunas overcome British attempts to erase them
“The Garifuna people were never slaves, they fought with valour.”
This piece is a part of a series that explores the legacy of slavery and colonialism on identity, history and culture in Africa and the Black diaspora. Read the primer piece here.
“In Ciriboya, Honduras, Camilla Leslie Crisanto Avila sifts cassava to make flour for bread while other Garifuna women look on.” Photo by Penny De Los santos for Saveur. Read more: Cassava Nation
Written by Ray Mwareya
In 1795, the British tried to colonize the Caribbean island of St. Vincent which was populated by the Garifuna ethnic people. The Garifunas – descendants of Afro-Indigenous populations in St. Vincent who were forcibly taken to the Roatan, the island off of mainland Honduras – resisted bravely.
Out of this proud defiance, “the British sent a spy to surveil the food aspect of Garifuna life to weaponize our food against us,” explained Garifuna culture archivist Audrey Flores. Flores is the director of the Garifuna Cultural Center in Roatan, which she founded alongside her sister Nora.
Half New Yorker and half Honduran, she moved from Brooklyn to Roatan to pursue a dedication to preserving the baking traditions, lifestyle and culture of the Garifuna community.
When the British were finally subdued, the Garifunas were taken away from their homeland in the hope that they would die along the way. The racist hope of the British was that by removing the Garifunas from their source of life – the cassava plant and cassava bread on St. Vincent Island – their spirit would break.
Drawing of a St. Vincent fruit market. Read more: GARIFUNA,THE BLACKS IN DIASPORA WHO WERE NEVER SLAVES
It all began in 1795, Flores said: “What started the original war between the British and the Garifuna on St. Vincent Island was that the Garifuna people were never slaves, they resisted slavery.”
“The British spy found out that we were using cassava bread to keep us nourished under war. That’s when the British sent a bunch of pigs to our Yuca farms to mess up the Yuca cassava crop, and therefore deplete our supply of cassava.”
The British had a difficult time fighting the Garifuna: St. Vincent is very mountainous, and the Garifuna people were masters of the land and the sea. The British returned to England for reinforcements and conjured up a dastardly tactic – food oppression.
“Upon [their] return, they used different tactics to weaken the Garifuna population – depleting our food supply. And one of the main foods that the Garifuna people ate and which we still eat to this day is cassava bread because it doesn’t expire,” said Flores – proudly.
However, their main goal of exiling the Garifuna from St. Vincent Island to Roatan Island – 1,700 kilometers away – finally succeeded.
“The British had a goal to ensure that, without cassava bread or crop, the Garifuna would die,” said Flores. “It partly worked. Half of us ended up dying being shipped to Roatan.”
Today the Garifunas are a population 4,000-strong in Roatan, with 300,000 in the diaspora worldwide: “So now you have this group of people who have been able to preserve their culture, for over 200 years because they resisted slavery,” Flores says she munches soup and cassava bread roll. “If we don’t preserve Garifuna baking legacy, we´ll lose a triumphant part of Black history.”
However, Garifunas in Roatan continue to face oppression, yet display eternal resistance: “Violent racism in Honduras doesn’t only affect Garifunas but all Indigenous inhabitants of Honduras.”
From colonial Africa to colonial Latin America, Catholicism has featured as the bedrock of European conquering armies. The Church was held up as a civilizing force in the armouries of invading French and Spanish armies.
While tracing the spirit of historical resistance among the Garifunas, Flores bemoans the new-age racism experienced by Garifunas from the Spanish, especially those living on mainland Honduras. First, over the last 200 years, the Catholics who dominate Spanish Honduran society have labored to convert Garifunas to Catholicism.
“The Spanish actually tried to force Catholicism on the Garifuna people and said ‘This is the only way we are gonna accept you in Honduras society. Your spirituality, your religion is demonic.’” said Flores. “As early as the 1970s we remember Spanish priests coming to the Garifuna communities, to pressure us to have Catholic mass.”
For centuries, British colonialism and forced Catholicism have all primed the Garifuna and Indigenous peoples of Honduras to be discriminated against in this way now.
“Honduras is enmeshed with racism. The root of race in Honduras is white Spanish colonialism and its descendants today who hold so much immense power in its governance and social structures,” said Flores. This has included land theft, discriminating labour laws and suppression of Indigenous political participation in Honduran affairs.
The Garifunas fear for survival as their leaders get abducted, jailed and killed as a way to force them off Caribbean coast-situated communal land coveted by wealthy hotel and resort developers from the United States, Canada and Europe – supposedly democratic nations.
According to the Inter-American Courts of Human Rights, five Garifuna leaders have been murdered since 2019 after campaigning to preserve their coastal ancestral lands from big tourism projects and corporate raids.
It’s little wonder that today, Honduras is held up as the world´s most violent country. With 56.52 homicides per 100,000 people, The Human Rights Watch considers Honduras to be among the world´s most deadly countries outside a war zone.
“What is less reported in these statistics about the tolls of drug violence in mainland Honduras is the violence meted out to the Indigenous people like the Garifunas. To reset Honduras to a path of durable peace, first there is a need for restorative dialogue with Indigenous people of Honduras,” she says.
Baking to preserve triumphant Black History
Today, the Garifuna Cultural Center is housed in a former bar in a restaurant Flores’s parents owned. And for the last 10 years, she has worked to document and revitalize the legacy and lifestyle of cassava bread-baking of Garifuna people on the island.
She sees her people’s pride in the cassava food: “As a people –as the Garifuna – we resisted slavery. Today, we must remain fierce and proud and never be shy of upholding our cassava baking traditions.”
Whatever odds Garifunas have faced, violent colonialism or land thefts, the spirit of their baking has refused to be subdued. For them, cassava is more than a diet: Baking it, and teaching others about its significance, is community building, preservation of identity and the mark of resilience of a people through centuries. That’s why, proudly, despite the advance of modern baking technology, the Garifunas artisanal way of making cassava bread, endures.
As Flores demonstrates the timeless method of taking dry cassava flour, removing poison wetness and baking it into bread, she sees the pride of her heritage in the food; the thread of their resistance to past and present injustices.
Ray Mwareya is a freelance culture writer and Black African immigrant in Canada. His work appears in Open Canada, Newsweek, Al Jazeera, CNBC and The Guardian.