Saint Vincent was the last of the Windward Islands to be colonised, defended for generations by the Caribs and by the Garifuna, the Black Caribs born of shipwrecked and escaped Africans who married into Carib communities and made the island's windward coast their own. Their defeat in 1797 ended with the deportation of thousands of Garifuna to Central America, carrying with them the ancestor rites and dugu feasts their descendants still practise from Belize to Honduras, while the chief Joseph Chatoyer, killed in the 1795 war, is now the country's first national hero.
The plantation colony that followed built the familiar Anglican and Methodist establishment, joined by Catholic missions and, after emancipation, by the churches the freed people made their own. The most distinctive of these were the Spiritual Baptists, called Shakers for the trembling that marks possession by the Spirit, whose worship of bell, chalk and mourning ground rituals drew a colonial ban in 1912; they prayed in secret in the hills for fifty years until the ordinance was repealed in 1965. The twentieth century brought the Pentecostal surge that now leads the census, alongside Adventists and evangelical congregations, and Rastafari took root here as across the eastern Caribbean, so that the islands' religious voice today runs from cathedral choir to drum, bell and chant.