“It takes me just one day to finish a small drum, and they go all around the world,” he said. “I only make one kind of drum – all you see here are Garifuna drums.” He then smiled sort-of sadly. “I don’t do this for money. I want to teach the kids to value their culture, to appreciate the past. But they don’t want to know any more.” The Garifuna culture Austin is fighting to preserve is a unique mix of traditions derived from South American Caribs and Arawaks and Kriols (Creole descendants of slaves and British loggers). Unlike most of the region’s other groups of African descent, the Garifuna were never slaves. In fact, they were forcibly exiled from the island of St Vincent to keep them away from slaving society.
After years of being marginalised, the Garifuna were given official recognition by UNESCO in 2001. Dangriga is the cultural capital of the Garifuna, with a small museum on its outskirts that takes visitors through the story of strife, exile, survival and pride. But drumming is the heartbeat of the culture and on one lucky outing I came across a large group of Garifuna kids practising their drumming and dancing for a competition the following day. Three kids beat out a rhythm that combined a pulse on a tall conga and a more complicated pattern on two smaller drums. Tony Gomez, the dance troupes teacher, explained: “The dancer leads so the drummers have to keep their eye focused on his feet. The dancer is there to contain the spirit of the dance.”
Dangriga was a strange place. I couldn’t connect the Taiwanese supermarkets, the yellow, black and white Garifuna flags and the Spanish-speaking market vendors. The pace of life was soporifically slow. I adopted a local snack bar as my refuge. King Burger was staffed by half a dozen women and served up a mean chicken and chips – the yin-yang of Caribbean cuisine. It operated a BYO policy so I took along a couple of bottles of iced Belikin beer and had a “gud, gud taim” doing nothing much at all.
Rivers and rum – An hour south by bus and I landed in a small and shabby paradise: Hopkins, another Garifuna stronghold but one on which the sun seemed to shine more strongly. Here expats, beach bums, Mayans and divers mixed with locals, and everybody said “Gud maanin!” as they passed each other on the main drag. Just off the southern end of this long sandy road was my shack-chalet, at a rustic resort called Jungle Jeanie’s by the Sea. Jeanie was a Canadian retiree who settled here in the 1990s with her husband John.
They had absorbed the local vibe, always taking time to chat during the hot afternoons, and slowly producing breakfasts and dinners for the dozen-or-so guests. I drank a fair bit of rum in Hopkins and ate some delicious Garifuna-influenced cuisine. While the cassava bread tasted like a big communion wafer with the goodness sucked out, the snapper and coconut-sauce stews, the yam mash and the plantain dumplings were excellent. I swam and walked it off on long hikes along the beach and rides on the resort’s free bikes.
