Ronald Raymond McDonald is a Belizean professional drummer, dancer and singer from the indigenous Garifuna people of the Caribbean. He is a former performer for the Belize National Dance Company and has a successful family-run cultural drum and dance school in his home town of Punta Gorda, Belize. He now lives in Edinburgh, and in between working as a Porter for the NHS, offers Garifuna drum and dance lessons and performances. He is Protecting Vulnerable Groups (PVG) registered for adults and children.
The Garifuna people are a blended Afro-Caribbean people who have never been enslaved: descendants of Africans from shipwrecked slave ships who made it to the shores of St. Vincent and there mixed with the Amerindian Carib and Arawak living there before Europeans arrived, creating a new blended people and culture. Their history is deeply connected with Edinburgh: The French and British fought over the island, and when the British won, Henry Dundas, 1st Viscount Melville, forced the Garifuna people from their island home in St. Vincent, and they migrated across Caribbean sea to the Caribbean coast of Honduras, Guatamela and Belize.
