Saint Vincent and the Grenadines

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ground rituals drew a colonial ban in 1912; they prayed in secret in the hills for fifty years until the ordinance was repealed in 1965.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.

In 1912 the legislature of Saint Vincent passed the Shakerism Prohibition Ordinance, a law aimed squarely at the Spiritual Baptists, the African Caribbean church whose services filled with ringing bells, rhythmic clapping and the shaking of worshippers seized by the Spirit. The ordinance declared their meetings unlawful, empowered police to break up services and seize the tools of worship, and made leading a meeting a criminal offence. The official justification spoke of public health and order; the practical effect was to criminalise the one church the colony's poor had built entirely for themselves.

For half a century the faith survived underground. Congregations met at night in the mountains and by rivers, posted lookouts for the police, disguised services as wakes, and kept the central rite of mourning, the days long fast and visionary seclusion by which believers travel in the Spirit and return with a spiritual gift and rank. Leaders were fined and jailed into the 1950s.

Repeal came in 1965, moved by Ebenezer Joshua, the country's dominant politician of the era, and the once banned church stepped back into the open, its bishops, pointers and mothers taking their place in national life. The neighbouring ban in Trinidad, repealed in 1951, is commemorated there with a public holiday, and in Saint Vincent the Spiritual Baptists' survival is now taught as a foundation story of religious freedom in the state that once outlawed them.