Black Carib

Black Caribs are indigenous people from the island of St. Vincent, formed by the mixture between Island Caribs and enslaved Africans produced in the 18th century. This population remains Caribbean culture and they make up a very small population in the archipelago, representing the 2.0% of the current population of St. Vincent and Grenadines. There are also black Caribs in Dominica and Trinidad. The history of the Black Caribs is known thanks to reports that the British governor William Young sent to the British crown, in which he explained that the Black Caribs were a mix of Caribs and enslaved Africans from Spanish ships wrecked near its shores. These reports were read and taken as reference by many chroniclers and later historians. However, researchers of history and Garifuna language (the Garifunas are descentants of Black Caribs in the mainland of Central America) of the 20th and 21st centuries, such as Itarala, have their own conception of the origin of the Black Caribs. According to them, the African ancestors of the Black Caribs come from other Caribbean islands and migrated to Saint Vincent as refugees to escape slavery and as slaves bought by the Carib Amerindians. The Black Caribs are the people who originated the Garifuna people, when part of their community was expelled from St. Vincent in 1797 and exported to the island of Roatán, Honduras, from where they migrated to the coast of the mainland of Central America, spread as far as Belize and Nicaragua.