St. Vincent and the Grenadines prime minister Ralph Gonsalves said that the British carried out genocide on the Garifuna and Kalinago nation and it was largely successful.
Gonsalves, speaking on the islands national heroes day, which recognizes the contributions of Joseph Chatoyer, said when the defeat of the Kalinago and Garifuna nations was complete, the British carried out ruthlessly what they had intended in the first case.
Gonsalves said the “project of genocide’ was largely successful because it reduced the population of Garifuna and Kalinago by about 10,000 in 1795, but they were defeated.
“The Kalinago and Garifuna nation genocides were carried out by the British; they killed people willy-nilly. However, Kalinago and Garifuna, rather than be captured and killed, jump off cliffs; they prefer land or death; they prefer death to being captured by the British and killed. The project of genocide included the taking of 4,500 people to Baliceaux, and they knew that people would have died in Baliceaux because the only animals that survived in Baliceaux up to that time were iguanas, lizards, and snakes.”.
“It was a staging post for what they had intended from the very beginning: to clean St. Vincent and the Grenadines (SVG) of Kalinago and Garifuna people. That was the intention from the beginning, and they largely succeeded because, by their acts, they removed from this territory an estimated 80% of the Kalinago and Garifuna people, either by killing them or by sending those who went to Baliceaux or those whom they exiled forcibly to Roatan Island”.
Gonsalves said the resilience of the Garifuna people is absolutely amazing and an inspiration for us as a nation.
“The Kalinago and the Garifuna people inspiring us is the easy part. The part that is more difficult is for us to pull out of ourselves what is good and noble in ourselves, not just when somebody else inspires us to use that inspiration. “Inspiration by itself ain’t going to take you optimally; you have to have drawn out of you what is good, what is noble in yourself, and the personal responsibility and the collective ownership in solidarity”, he said.
