(Excerpts of National Heroes’ Day Address by Dr. the Hon. Godwin Friday, Leader of the Opposition)
This National Holiday is a time to pause and reflect – both from a personal standpoint and a national view – on the journeys we have undertaken singularly or together this year and it gives us a moment to look forward as well to how we might continue to build our country.
We have battled through many challenges in recent times. Nevertheless, we have much to celebrate and be thankful for. We have life, we have family and friends, we have community, and we have our beautiful country. Most of all, we have the grace and the mercy of God.
But though we may sometimes become consumed with our own trials and challenges, we must not forget the great sorrow that our forebears lived and witnessed over two centuries ago. That is the exile and near extermination of the Garifuna people.
And lest we are tempted to absolve the perpetrators of this monstrous crime by saying it was a different age and a different time with morals and mores that excused and accommodated the actions meted out by the British to our ancestors, let’s think again. For it was not that long ago! It was not the dark ages in Europe. It was a time of enlightenment and progress, of science and art. A time of fervent and expanding Christianity, which taught that we are all God’s children and must love one another as we love ourselves.
So, the servants of British imperialism knew what they were doing. When they hunted the Garifuna warriors and starved them into submission, they were following a deliberate plan.
When they decided that the Garifuna could not be trusted to truly surrender to them, though they had come with awesome weapons and an unquenchable lust for conquest to take away the Garifuna land and vanquish their sovereignty, they banished them from their homeland. First to Balliceaux then to Roatan and ultimately to Central America.
That much of the history we know; that part is now painfully familiar to us. But do we know how the people who were forcibly marooned on Balliceaux lived during those terrible months that they were captives there?
Can we even begin to imagine what a mother might have said to her child under those terrible conditions, when there was no food to eat and no water to drink, a disease and death stalked them all?
Can we even imagine what a father said to his wife and children to console them and give them hope when he had no land to farm, could not go to sea to catch fish and therefore could not provide for his family?
Can we imagine what it must have been like to suddenly go from fierce assertion of liberty and sovereignty to being trapped on a barren island, their home in sight, but unable to go back because hostile ships patrolled the waters and would soon take them further away from their home, never to return?
Can we even begin to imagine what men- warriors- would have said to one another to bolster their confidence and sustain their dignity as the ships set sail from Balliceaux beginning a journey they could not comprehend to a land they did not know?
Like the vastness of the universe, it is unimaginable. And thus, the crime committed, the injustice done to these people, our ancestors, is on the same scale. As such, can there ever be atonement? I think not. But that does not mean that nothing should be done.
We speak now of legally acquiring Balliceaux and making it a protected heritage of our nation. That time has finally arrived and it is welcome. So, too the calls for reparations. When it comes, that too would be a good start.
But, of course, declaring Balliceaux a protected heritage is not a thing for celebration. Celebrating would not be the right way to describe it, for there is too much suffering and too much pain underlying that act of recognition and preservation. There was too much death and sorrow on Balliceaux; too many lost graves of our captive ancestors for celebration. For we do not celebrate in a graveyard! We cannot rejoice even in this important step forward. Rather, the preservation of Balliceaux will be a solemn recognition of the suffering and it will be our promise that it will never be forgotten; that we will forever mourn for those who suffered and died in the genocide.
We owe it to them because it is upon their struggle and their indomitable spirit that we now continue to build our nation. The obstacles we confront today may appear different, but the struggle is the same: for human dignity and a people’s sovereignty.
Every year at this time, we here in SVG reflect of this tragedy. But, for the descendant of the exiled Garifuna, it is far more than a cause for reflection; it is a great sorrow, a sense of loss and a yearning to return, to make a journey that the tormentors of their ancestors never intended for them to make. Beyond the monuments and the sacred places that we properly recognize, there are the lessons we have learned for our Garifuna ancestors that may help us as we go forward.
The first is this: no matter the hardship, persevere. Keep moving forward! For think about it: how did just over 2000 people forced to settle in a strange and hostile land survive with their culture and language to be here over two hundred years later? That is a story yet to be properly told; to be celebrated not just by the Garifuna and by us in SVG, but by all of humanity! And it must be told, for it exemplifies courage and heroism beyond measure, and can only serve to inspire anyone who learns of it.