Garifuna Collective

They have played at major music festivals worldwide, performed in over thirty countries, won awards such as the BBC World Music Award, and produced numerous successful albums.

To mark its twentieth anniversary, the Garifuna Collective is now on a world tour.

The Garifuna are descendants of enslaved Africans who, presumably as a result of a shipwreck, were stranded off the coast of St. Vincent in the 17th century. Together with the indigenous Arawak people living there, they established free, just, and well-organized communities on the island that were able to resist the European colonial powers for over a century, until the British finally drove them off to the Central American mainland in the 18th century, where they settled along the coasts of Honduras, Belize, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. To this day, the Garifuna preserve their own language, music, and culture, which have also been inscribed on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

• Location: Miriam Makeba Auditorium