Cooking with the Garifuna: How Tourism Can Preserve Belize’s Garifuna Culture

In Belize, new cultural initiatives are helping tourists to connect with the country’s Garifuna past, while also helping the Garifuna to preserve their history.

By Richard Collett

‘But it was not quite the end. Dumped on a distant shore, the few hardy survivors did not die out.’
The Black Carib Wars: Freedom, Survival, and the Making of the Garifuna, by Christopher Taylor.

“We’ve come a long way as a people,” said Bobby Nunez, as he descaled a mackerel he’d caught that morning amongst corals in the Caribbean Sea. “If it wasn’t for the British, we wouldn’t be here. But I don’t mean that in a good way. We went to war with the British.”

Wearing a chaotically bright, floral shirt, and with a brighter yellow scarf wrapped around his head, Bobby had been up early, emptying nets he’d help place the night before off the coast of Seine Bight, a small Garifuna village a few miles north of the tourist hotspot of Placencia.

Bobby’s wife, Kim Nunez, was busy breaking open coconuts, brushing her long dark hair from her brow as she prepared the ingredients for Hudut, a hearty Garifuna stew that the six or so tourists assembled for the cooking class would be making that day.

“After the Maya, we are the second Indigenous group in Belize,” Bobby continued, hacking the head off the mackerel with a walloping thump of his knife as he told us the story of his people, the Garifuna. “We came here in exile. We were originally from St Vincent, but now there are hundreds of thousands of us, living all along the Caribbean coast. We have our own language, music, culture, clothes and cooking.”

Bobby and Nunez are proud descendants of a people who’ve endured endless hardship, exile and discrimination through the centuries. Now, they’re part of a project encouraging tourists to delve deeper into Belize’s Garifuna culture – through cooking classes, music and a new Garifuna Tourism Trail – while also helping the Garifuna preserve their unique heritage for future generations.

The Garifuna of Belize

In 1797, the Black Caribs – a group of mixed Arawak Indians and runway African slaves from the Caribbean island of St Vincent – were defeated by the British after decades of warfare and rebellions. Britain’s Royal Navy marooned the survivors on the remote, uninhabited island of Roatan, some 2700 kilometres from their homeland.

The British left them to die. But they didn’t. The Black Caribs survived, many left Roatan, and they began building communities across Central America’s Caribbean coast, in Belize, Guatemala and Honduras. They retained their distinct language and identity, and 200 years after their exile, they’re now known as the Garifuna.

“When our ancestors came here they were escaping war,” Kim said with a solemn tone as she poured coconut milk into a battered steel bowl. “They paddled day and night from Roatan. But there was peace and hope in the darkness. That’s what the yellow, white and black stripes of our Garifuna flag represent today.”

Garifuna cooking is done at a leisurely, communal pace, and it’s allowed for a rich storytelling tradition to pass down through generations. It also allowed the Garifuna language, descended from the Arawakan of St Vincent, to be preserved, and in 2001, Garifuna music, dance and language were all recognised by UNESCO as a ‘Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity’.

“We’ve come a long way as a people.”
Bobby Nunez.

Traditions were built, too, and every year on 19th September Belize’s Garifuna communities celebrate their ‘Settlement Day’, with drumming, parades, feasting and drinking. Kim explained how they dress up and paddle the canoes out to sea, turn them around and re-enact the landing of their ancestors, raising the Garifuna flag on the beach. Dishes like Hudut, a fish stew, cooked in a rich coconut broth and served with mashed plantains, are usually reserved for special occasions like that, but Kim and Bobby were happy to make an exception to show off their best cooking to visitors.

“Cooking Garifuna style makes you hungry!” Bobby exclaimed, as he finished slicing the mackerel and passed around some green coconuts for us to all drink. “Now, who wants to help with the plantains? We’ll need a bit of muscle to get it done, but it’s great for anger management.”

Cooking Garifuna style

Bobby placed a pile of peeled plantains into a wooden pestle. We took turns, using a tall wooden stick as a pestle until Bobby was satisfied that we not only had enough mashed plantain for us all, but that it was sufficiently pulverised to be tender. It was tough work in the heat, and I was dripping with sweat as I flopped back onto the wooden bench in the shade of the wooden home they’d built with their own hands.

Kim now showed us which vegetables, herbs and spices were going into the coconut broth, while Bobby fired up his makeshift grill and started on the mackerel. “Sweet peppers, garlic, oregano, mint and cilantro,” Kim said happily, as she furiously chopped away on the workbench. “We cook the okra separately so it doesn’t get too slimy in the broth. All fresh ingredients. The best part of course is the eating!”

She threw the chopped ingredients into the large pot of coconut broth, which simmered away on a low heat until the fish was grilled through. Bobby added the grilled mackerel, bones and all, to the pot, before liberally sprinkling salt, pepper and a garlic spice mix.

While we waited for the Hudut to reduce, Kim showed us a century-old grater they used for cassava, an heirloom passed down through her family. “Everything about Garifuna food is hard work,” she exclaimed, talking about the traditional preparation techniques they used most days. Life in a Garifuna community, she added, could be just as hard.

Read more: 25 Best Places to Visit in Belize

A dwindling culture?

“Seine Bight can be a rough place to live sometimes,” Kim mused. “There’s a health centre, but we’ve had no nurse for six years. We can’t always afford a taxi to Dangriga, let alone Belize City when we need to see a doctor.”

Bobby jumped in, explaining with disgust how he’d lost land, gifted to him by a German expatriate friend ,to the government, after he couldn’t prove it was lawfully his. “We went to court in Belize City,” he said sadly. “But Garifuna people have always had problems keeping their land and property.”

There are an estimated 300,000 people of Garifuna descent across the world, and here in Belize, they make up around 5% of the population. But despite surviving British colonialism in the Caribbean, their culture has always been on a precipice. Historically, the community have faced discrimination, and they’ve been marginalised and excluded from positions of power in the countries they now call home.

“Everything about Garifuna food is hard work.”
Kim Nunez.

It’s a similar story across Central America, and in Honduras, things are arguably much worse, as Garifuna leaders are regularly kidnapped and even murdered as they attempt to protect their land from government-sponsored takeovers. Sadly, many of these land takeovers result from large-scale tourist developments, like building hotels.

In the face of such adversity, it’s remarkable that the Garifuna culture and its language have survived, even in a state as multi-ethnic and multi-lingual as Belize, where Maya is heard spoken alongside Plautdietsch German. Despite being protected by UNESCO, the Endangered Languages Project lists Garifuna as ‘at risk’, largely because the widespread use of English and Spanish means native speakers are dwindling.

A brighter future for the Garifuna

The Nunez family, though, have found one small way to protect their culture and introduce their history to tourists. They were encouraged to continue with their cooking classes by Taste Belize, a food-focused community-based tourism initiative located down the road in Placencia. They also lead Garifuna music and dance workshops, showing how tourism has the capacity to help preserve Garifuna culture across Belize. The proceeds from tourism helped Bobby and Kim buy a small parcel of land here in Seine Bight.

The approach has proven popular, and in 2022 the Belize tourism board decided to fund the country’s first-ever ‘Garifuna Tourism Trail’, which also aims to preserve Garifuna culture on a national level through tourism. The project has started with a Garifuna Heritage Trail in the towns of Hopkins and Dangriga (just north of Seine Bight), where there are Garifuna-run guesthouses and cultural experiences (including a Garifuna museum). There are plans (and funding) to expand the tourist trail to other communities across Belize, including places like Seine Bight.

After Bobby and Kim had told us of the travails of the Garifuna people, and their great hope that tourism can help to provide economic and cultural relief on a grassroots level in Belize, it was time for us to eat. Kim mixed the mashed plantains in with the still-simmering fish stew and poured out heartily-sized portions for us all. The smell was tantalising, the fish fell off the bone and the plantains were tender enough, even for Bobby, who was the first to dig right in.

“You are welcome anytime in Belize,” Kim told us as we all followed Bobby’s lead and dug deep into the coconut Hudut broth. “I just hope we’ve taught you even a little about our Garifuna culture and history.”