PUNTA GORDA, Belize, 4 October 2003 — An old Belizean with a battered guitar and dead ancestors for muses is leading young descendants of shipwrecked African slaves and Caribbean Indians back to their musical roots.
Long-confined to wakes and funerals in villages along the Caribbean coasts of Guatemala, Honduras and Belize, paranda, a deeply spiritual guitar music of Central America’s black Garifuna ethnic group, had all but died out.
Discovered by a local record company after years in oblivion, Paul Nabor, one of paranda’s last surviving masters, is saving it from extinction and inspiring a new generation to keep it alive. The white-haired 75-year-old with sparkling eyes and a flyweight boxer’s frame lives in Punta Gorda, a ramshackle town on the south coast of this tiny country of just 250,000 inhabitants wedged between Mexico and Guatemala.
For more than a decade, Nabor as Punta Gorda’s Garifuna spirit guide has dispensed advice and blessings from a wooden temple in a mixture of Catholicism and African rituals.
But his battered guitar tells of a past life moonlighting as a minstrel between back-breaking stints working in ports and plantations.
Nabor never studied music and can barely read or write. He says his songs are gifts from dead ancestors.
“I’m asleep and in my dream I hear a tune,” he said in heavily accented Creole English. “I start humming it until I bring it out.”
Roughened fingers picked out a mournful arpeggio on worn bass strings as he sang a high, haunting introduction in the vowel-heavy Garifuna tongue.
Then he quickened the pace to a foot-tapping strum, shaking his shoulders to the rhythm as he belted out a cheery melody through a broad smile.
The song, “Naguya Nei” — “I’m Moving On” — recounts how his dying sister asked for an upbeat band to liven up her funeral.
Some half million Garifuna live on northern Central America’s Caribbean coast, descended from African slaves who intermarried with Indians on the island of Saint Vincent after being shipwrecked there in 1635 on their way to the Americas.
Since settling in the area after being deported from Saint Vincent by the British a century later, they have maintained their unique language and culture in part by handing them down to younger generations through music.
But as thousands of Garifuna migrate north to the United States in search of work, ancient traditions like paranda, an adaptation of African drumbeats and singing styles to the Spanish guitar, are drowning in a tide of US pop culture.
Kept alive by a few reclusive old masters, the genre was in danger of dying out when Garifuna musician Andy Palacio heard Nabor play in 1993 and passed a tape to a small Belize record company bent on reviving traditional local music.
Stonetree Records founder Ivan Duran recorded Nabor with other veteran artists on “Paranda,” an album later released internationally. The veteran troubadour was soon playing to thousands of world music fans from Europe to the Far East.
“The audience fell in love with him,” Duran said of one French concert. “He got two encores; people just went wild.”
Now young Belizean Garifuna have begun including paranda songs on their albums and are even writing their own.
“Nabor has shown the younger generation that there is another way of looking at music,” said Duran.
Lloyd Augustine, a 22-year-old Garifuna singer-songwriter, is among upcoming paranda artists recording their songs on a new Stonetree album due out soon.
“You get goose bumps when you hear it. It touches you deep down,” he said of the genre. “Nabor’s woken everybody up.”
As Jamaican rap boomed through the Punta Gorda night amid the chirps of crickets, Nabor bemoaned the rise of the portable stereo or “boom box” as it is known here.
“The youth doesn’t want to learn,” he tutted. “They love the boom-box more than singing, but if there’s no singing there will be nothing to put in the box.”
His grandson Gordon Zuniga, a 23-year-old with long dreadlocks whom Nabor is teaching to sing and play, said paranda will never die. “There will always be someone who plays it,” he said, strumming as the old man looked on proudly.
“It’s inside of us,” said Zuniga. “We can’t forget it.”
