Jun 6, 2025
Annette Thomas Sanford, current chief of the Kalinago of Dominica
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Annette Thomas Sanford, current chief of the Kalinago of Dominica
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Wai‘tu kubuli ( Tall is her Body ) After being battered by hurricanes over the last few years still standing tall In spirits I am there for your 40th #dominica #Waitukubuli #carribean #westindies #40th #tallshestands https://www.instagram.com/p/BpxZMAZlaGX/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1fbff0q2r6hwu
One of the earliest English writers on the Caribbean, John Davies, translating the observations made by the Frenchman Charles de Rochefort, noted the increasing number of Africans among the Kalinagos during the following century: ‘In Dominico there are some Caribs [Kalinago] who have many Negroes as slaves… Some of them they got from the English Plantations and some from the Spanish ships heretofore cast away on their coasts, and they are called Tamons, that is Slaves: they are so well ordered, that they serve them in all things about which they are employed, with as much obedience, readiness and respect as if they were the most civilized people in the world.’ This description of Africans as serving as ‘slaves’ to the Kalinagos is now disputed. Judging from other literature it is more likely that the Kalinagos were incorporating this other ethnic group into their kinship system for the survival of both (see: Lennox Honeychurch, Carib to Creole, a history of contact and cultural exchange. Unpublished doctoral thesis, 1997, Bodleian Library, Oxford University)."
"In the Forest of Freedom: The fighting Maroons of Dominica" (Lennox Honeychurch)
"In the Forest of Freedom: The fighting Maroons of Dominica" (Lennox Honeychurch) Chapter 3 "The First Maroons: the Kalinago foundation”
It was dawn when the great canoes came over the east horizon, their bows rising and dipping with the swell and cutting through the crested waves, each vessel driven by huge white wings of cloth spread out before the power of the wind, all painted with the blood-red crosses of their sailors' faith. Peering through the thick foliage of the windswept littoral forest the islanders watched in awe as the strange craft came nearer to the coast.
Agile Kalinago youth ran along the precipitous cliff-side pathways that threaded up and over the rugged headlands jutting out into the Atlantic Ocean. Leaping over volcanic rocks and between the trees they kept pace wit the 17 ships which skirted the inhospitable shoreline as if looking for a landing place. But there was no sheltered bay along this windward coast that was large enough or safe enough to accommodate such a fleet of caravels, and by noon the Kalinagos saw the seaborne apparition disappear northwards like a flock of low-flying pelicans towards the flat island of Aichi and mountainous Karoukera and perhaps even further on to Borenquin and Aiti.
Unknown to the Kalinago as they watched the ships sail by that morning, their island, which they knew as Wai'tu kubuli, had been claimed by the admiral of the fleet as the property of a distant kind and queen and had been renamed in a foreign tongue for an alien god.
To the strangers abroad the caravels, in their reckoning of time, it was Sunday, 3 November 1493 when they approached the island that one of them described as 'all very mountainous, very beautiful and very green down to the water's edge. And with the self-confident ignorance characteristic of colonisers through the ages they assumed this jumble of peaks rising out of a restless sea was nameless, or perhaps had a name unworthy of attention, so they christened it in Latin, Dies Dominica, for the Day of their Lord. Already the strangers had determined that the people of this newfound Dominica were called Caribees or Caribales or Cannibals; but for many years the Kalinagos were unaware of this new identity that had been thrust upon them. Some time went by before they saw such ships again but by then news had already reached them of the pillage, fire, and killing wrought by these pale hairy strangers covered in shells of metal that reflected the sun. It was Taino refugees, fleeing massacre and enslavement on the lager islands, who brought them news of this greed-fed madness driven by a thirst for the shining yellow metal found among the rocks and streams of the Greater Antilles.
From the time of Columbus' arrival, the Amerindian islanders put up a spirited resistance to colonisation and enslavement. Spanish raiders swept through the flatter more accessible islands of the Lesser Antilles from about 1503 to near the end of the century. They were armed with guns, swords, and hunting dogs with declarations or cedulas and requerimientos issued by the joint Spanish monarchy of Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon. These edicts permitted Spanish colonists to seize all natives on the island south of Puerto Rico as far as Trinidad; to wage war upon, enslave, and sell duty free any Kalinagos 'because the inhabitants of those islands are given as slaves for their resistance to Christians and because they are said to eat human flesh.' This propaganda was begun by Columbus based on misinformation received from the Tainos of the Greater Antilles during his first voyage; it was used to justify Kalinago enslavement and massacre by perpetrating a slander that was to hound the Kalinago for centuries. The captured Amerindians were taken to the slave markets of San Juan, Hispaniola and Cuba and forced to work in mines and on haciendas and were put to dive for pearls off the islands of Margarita and Los Roches along the Caribbean coast of South America. The Spanish objective was not merely to procure slave labour but also to clear the islands of what they saw as dangerous neighbours.
Many Tainos and Kalinagos simply died of disease, that invisible, unintended weapon brought from Europe in the form of smallpox and measles. Disease often travelled ahead of the raids, carried unknowingly by natives who had been in contact with Spaniards. In this way, whole communities of indigenous people fell victim before the conquistadors' actual arrival in their villages to inflict the coup de grace.
Thanks to the topography of Dominica (and St Vincent to the south), the Kalinago could retreat into the mountains from where they resisted Spanish slave raiders. Their Kalinago ancestors had named this island for its mountainous terrain, first seen rising steeply out of the ocean as they had approached it on their way up the Lesser Antilles from South America. Raymond Breton, the 17th century French missionary, recorded the name as Ouáitoucoubouli, composed of the words ouaitúmti: it is tall; nócoubou: my body; li: her on or, in the modern version, Wai'tu kubuli: 'tall is her body.'
As early as 1499 the Kalinagos of Ouyouhao (today's Prince Rupert's Bay in northern Dominica) launched a furious attack on a landing party led by Admiral Alonso de Ojeda that included Amerigo Vespucci, after whom the Americas was named. So significant was this experience that it was recorded in an engraving by the foremost illustrator of Spanish conquest Theodore De Bry. The Kalinagos' guerilla-style warfare, waged in a familiar landscape, gave them every advantage. 'They shoot so quickly that they can let loose ten or a dozen arrows in the time it takes to load a gun,' commented one observer. In any case the Spaniards quickly found out that enslaving a Kalinago was a tough and largely unrewarding business. Numerous Kalinagos escaped and made their way back to their islands strengthened in their resolve not to make any concessions to Europeans.
The Kalinagos developed a robust disrespect for the Christian crucifix which they saw as a symbol of Spanish cruelty. As late as the 1690s the Kalinagos of southern Dominica repeatedly destroyed any cross raised upon their land. The French priest and adventurer Pére Jean Baptiste Labat also noted that although the Kalinagos felt that crucifixes in their huts would sometimes protect them from evil spirits they could also cause them bad luck in hunting and fishing. In such cases, he reported, 'They will then burn the cross and smash it to pieces.'
Mariners who landed in Dominica took the precaution of being well armed because of the unpredictability of the reception by the Kalinagos. Some reports spoke of spirited attacks with showers of arrows from the islanders while sailors were drawing barrels of water from the rivers. Other accounts indicated no action at all except for an ominous silence broken only by the rustling of trees in the wind. English accounts from the late 16th century, particularly those of Sir Francis Drake, George Clifford 3rd Earl of Cumberland and Sir Anthony Shirley, gave reports of peaceful trading with the Kalinagos, who by that time had become increasingly dependent on European trade goods, particularly iron tools and cotton cloth.
In 1700, during an expedition to visit the Kalinagos and explore the wild eastern side of Dominica, Pére Labat noted their passion for liberty: 'There are no people in the world so jealous of their liberty, or who resent more the smallest check on their freedom. They laugh at us for obeying and respecting out rulers, and say we must be their slaves, and that since we allow them to give us orders we must also be cowards... Our Caribs... have always been a bellicose people, who are proud and indomitable, and prefer death to slavery.' During this visit to the island, Labat estimated the number of Kalinagos in Dominica to be no more than 2,000 'and of these, two thirds are women and children.'
Labat is also an important voice in defending the Kalinago against the accusation of cannibalism: 'It is a mistake to believe that the savages of our islands are cannibals, or that they go to war for the express purpose of capturing prisoners in order to devour them. I have proofs to the contrary clearer than day.' They did, however, keep smoked body parts preserved in their huts as trophies of victory to excite raiding parties prior to their departure and to strike fear into their enemies. The fact that this practice was talked about, exaggerated, and repeated down the centuries proves the effectiveness of it as a fear tactic that mad Europeans hesitate to go among the Kalinagos. Cultural exchange
Nevertheless, long before the actual colonisation of the island by Europeans, an intriguing collection of different nationalities and ethnic groups was to be found in the Kalinago villages during the late 16th and early 17th centuries. There were Africans who had travelled back with Kalinago seafarers after their raids on neighbouring islands or European deserters from ships that had stopped briefly in Dominica to refresh their crews. Others had escaped from slavery or indenture on plantations as far away as Puerto Rico. A few were survivors of shipwrecks. This form of marronage was nor peculiar to Dominica. At the Cape of Gracias à Dios on the Spanish Main there were Africans living among the Amerindians who had landed from a shipwreck; these Africans ‘being bound for Terra Firma in a ship that carried them to be sold in those parts, they killed the Captain and the mariners, with design to return to their country. But, through their ignorance in marinery, they stranded their vessel hereabouts.’ A shipwreck of Africans on the shores of Bequia in the Grenadines in the 1640s and slaves escaping by boat from Barbados later in that century created a similar situation in St Vincent. In 1569 it was estimated that there were more than 30 Spaniards and 40 Africans living among the Kalinagos in the vicinity of Ouyouhao. Among them was an African woman called Luisa de Navarette, who was captured by Kalinago raiders during an attack on Puerto Rico in 1576 and brought to Dominica where she lived for four years. She was picked up by a passing Spanish ship, taken back to Puerto Rico, and there recounted her experiences to the Bishop of San Juan in 158- giving details of her life with the Kalinagos and recalling the language and customs that she had adopted. While new colonies were being settled to the north and south of the island by English, French and Dutch investors, Dominica continued to stand green and defiant in the centre of the chain of the Lesser Antilles, Enslaved Africans shipped across the Atlantic to work the cane fields and sugar factories on these new settlements risked their lives to escape across the sea towards the mountainous island on the horizon as colonisation intensified after 1625 when the English adventurer Sir Thomas Warner established a colony in St. Kitts, henceforth described to generations of schoolchildren across the region as ‘the mother colony of the British West Indies.’ One of the earliest English writers on the Caribbean, John Davies, translating the observations made by the Frenchman Charles de Rochefort, noted the increasing number of Africans among the Kalinagos during the following century: ‘In Dominico... there are some Caribs who have many Negroes as slaves... Some of them they got from the English Plantations and some from the Spanish ships heretofore cast away on their coasts, and they are called Tamons, that is Slaves: they are so well ordered, that they serve them in all things about which they are employed, with as much obedience, readiness and respect as if they were the most civilized people in the world.’ This description of Africans as serving as ‘slaves’ to the Kalinagos is now disputed. Judging from other literature it is more likely that the Kalinagos were incorporating this other ethnic group into their kinship system for the survival of both (see: Lennox Honeychurch, Carib o Creole, a history of contact and cultural exchange. Unpublished doctoral thesis, 1997, Bodleian Library, Oxford University). Certainly, the Amerindians passed on much of their knowledge of the island environment an survival techniques to the Africans. From their word for the colour black tiboulou, they called the Africans tiboulotie in the men’s language and meguerou in the women’s language. The latter word may have been influenced by the Spanish, negro, since they were first aware of them in the company of Spanish soldiers and sailors, although they may have been in contact with Africans who made it across the Atlantic before Columbus (see Basil Davidson, The Story of Africa, Mitchell Beazley Publishers, 1984, p113. An account is given by Mansa Musa of Mali in 1324 of 200 canoes with one year’s rations sent west into the Atlantic. Another larger fleet was sent some time later but never returned. However, it has been shown that due to contrary currents and winds it was unlikely that Africans who made it across the Atlantic to the Americas were ever able to return home.) As the Kalinagos observed the ethnic mix taking place between Africans and Europeans in the early years of colonisation, they gave their own name, cachionna, to ‘a child born of a white man and a black woman.’ The Kalinago names of places, plants and animals survive today thanks to the 16th and 17th century period of contact and cultural exchange; and in the 21st century Dominicans remain the greatest users of Kalinago words in the world. Their speech is filled with references to Kalinago place names such as Colihaut, Calibishe, Coulibistrie, Bataka, Batali, Salybia and Boeri. They also refer, for example, to cirique and touloulou (crabs), acouma, balata and coubari (trees), zanana, cashima, cowossol and zicaque (fruit), yen-yen and ariri (insects), sibouli, vivaneau, balaou, couliou, titiwi (fish), batu, cali, canáoa (fishing equipment) and even the national bird, the sisserou. Much research has been done on the Creole languages of the colonial period that developed from a mixture of European and African languages. However, except for the work of the British linguist Douglas Taylor, there has been very little investigation into the Kalinago loan words adopted in pre-colonial Dominica. The Africans who arrived among the Kalinagos came from a wide variety of West African language groups. If they had arrived in Dominica before the 1690s, the basis for communication would have been through the Kalinago language. The strange new places, plants and animals were introduced to them buy the Kalinagos using pre-Columbian Arawakan names. With the commencement of plantation slavery on the island in the early 18th century, the Africans who were already in Dominica passed on these words to the ever-increasing number of new arrivals coming off the slave ships. French woodcutters, white indentured labourers and army deserters among them would have picked up those names as well. Unlike the other island states in the Lesser Antilles, the pre-Columbian Kalinago contribution to the Creole culture of Dominica remains extremely strong. It was the 19th century British author and traveller Anthony Trollope, who most succinctly summarised the meaning of Creole while on a voyage through the islands in the 1850s: ‘It should be understood that a Creole is a person born in the West Indies of a race not indigenous to the islands. There may be white Creoles, coloured Creoles, or black Creoles. People talk of Creole horses and Creole poultry; namely those which haven not themselves been imported, but by which have been bred from imported stock.’ He could have added music, dance, language, food, and architecture, but even as he wrote the extended use of the word was still evolving. Spawned during the early period of contact and culture exchange in the Caribbean the process of ‘creolisation’ went from strength to strength. In Dominica it had its roots in the early process of contact and cultural exchange that was taking place as West Africans adapted their continental experience to the more compact tropical island world of the Kalinagos. This interaction between two alienated groups was evolving a form of creolisation on the periphery of European influence. It is true that the Kalinagos were already adopting Spanish and Portuguese loan words into their language such as boulatta for plata (silver) and cábrara for capra (goat) as well as trading cassava and tobacco for useful European goods. Similarly, the African arrivals had also been open to various European influences on the ‘slave coast’, the Middle Passage and during their brief plantation experience. But once together on the island the cross-cultural interaction was essentially between each other. The Kalinagos must have soon recognised the diversity of societies and class hierarchies among the new African settlers. Roman Catholic missionaries in the French colonies at the time had already recorded 13 different African language groups in the neighbouring islands and a similar variety would have been present in Dominica. As the years progressed, traces of African languages, such as Yoruba, Twi, Ewe, Fon, Ibo, Nembe, Ashanti, Kru, Wolof and several others, survived in the island’s Creole culture. Clues to these connections have lingered in a word here, a song pattern there, or a character of the spirit world whose African roots had survived. The name of the popular delicacy, the titiwi accra, for instance, is composed of the Kalinago word titiwi for the small river fish (Sicyidium punctatum) and the Yoruba àkàrà (a fried bean-cake). It is symbolic of the cross cultural linkages that took place between Africans and Amerindians during the two centuries prior to formal European colonisation.
Last nights #WCQualifier DOM vs CAN. Even though we lost 4-0 everyone had a great time #webroughtdrums #smallislandbigsupport Pretty sure 80-90% of the Dominicans who live in the GTA were there #waitukubuli #lovemyisland @zamanithomas we missed you
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