On Nov. 30, when the bells inside the clock tower of Bridgetown's House of Parliament tolled midnight, Barbados officially severed its four-centuries-long association with the British Crown, adopting a republican form of government.
Barbados' political transition responds to numerous factors. Some take us back centuries to the reign of Charles I of England (1625-1649); others, even further back to the West African kingdoms of the Akan and Kongo. There are other more contemporary factors like the worldwide decolonization process that followed World War II. And there are immediate causes, such as the emergence and subsequent globalization of the Black Lives Matter movement and the killing of George Floyd in the spring of 2020.
The Caribbean was forged by two powerful, mutually reinforced institutions: slavery and colonialism; the other half of the story is one of resistance to slavery and struggle against colonial rule. Knowledge of these forces and counterforces helps us understand why Barbados (the most English of Britain's Caribbean colonies) has broken ties with the British Crown.
Footage and pictures of the Nov. 30 ceremonies evidence the fact that Barbados is a black nation (around 95% of the population); almost all Barbadians descend from slaves. Only one white person participated in the transition ceremony — more on him later.
British settlers brought the island's first six African slaves in 1627. With the sugar revolution in full gear, by 1655, 20,000 slaves toiled on the island. Ten years later, there were as many black slaves as white settlers. The number of blacks continued to grow while the white population dwindled — much of it emigrating to South Carolina; 1684 census records reflect a population of almost 20,000 white settlers and 46,500 black slaves.
Historians agree that Barbados saw some of the most brutal treatment of slaves in the region. As elsewhere in "Plantation America," the slaves of Barbados resisted and fought for their freedom. But geographic conditions, namely the island's predominantly flat terrain, made flight from plantations difficult and slave rebellions easy to suffocate by colonial militia forces. In mountainous islands like Jamaica, escaped slaves established long-lasting maroon settlements powerful enough to fight prolonged wars against the British and to secure freedom and land concessions through successfully negotiated treaties. In Jamaica their descendants still call themselves "maroons," live in towns founded by 18th-century runaway slaves and preserve close-knit communities rich in African culture.
As the sugar industry gobbled up forests, turning them into cane fields, large-scale slave flight became increasingly difficult and those who managed to escape were soon captured. As far back as at least 1675 slaves revolted, but an inauspicious geography condemned insurrections to failure, followed by harsh punishments, including beheading or burning revolt leaders alive.
Execution by beheading was a common English practice long before French revolutionaries mechanized it and applied it wholesale. Oliver Cromwell's republican Roundheads decapitated Charles I in 1649; his son Charles II avenged his father with a-head-for-a-head justice. Long dead, Cromwell was exhumed and posthumously decapitated. No heads rolled in the Barbadian transition to republicanism, and another Charles, the Prince of Wales, who attended the peaceful "removal" of his mother as head of state is an unlikely candidate to head — pun intended — another war of restoration. In all seriousness, the prospect of the Prince of Wales becoming head of state accelerated Barbadian republicanism.
Among all of Barbados' failed slave insurrections, the largest and best organized was Bussa's Rebellion (1816), named after its African-born leader. Bussa commanded around 400 slaves. He and another 119 rebels died in battle with the colonial militia; another 144 were executed.
As celebratory fireworks lit the sky above Bridgeport on Nov. 30, Bussa's statue — also known as the Emancipation Statue — looked down on the joyous ceremony taking place at the National Heroes Square, so renamed in 1999 after nearly a century of bearing the blatantly colonial name Trafalgar Square.
It is paradoxical that the Caribbean's "most English" island with its deep-seated monarchical tradition has become a republic before other former British colonies with longer and deeper anti-colonialist trajectories. A more rebellious Jamaica, homeland to maroon leaders Captain Cudjoe, Quao and Queen Nanny, along with Marcus Garvey, Harry Belafonte, Bob Marley and Michael Manley, still keeps the British monarch as its head of state. Barbados may have perhaps begun a global pandemic of republicanism that may very well spread to Jamaica and beyond, to Australia and Canada, to Kenya and Sierra Leone, all the way to Pakistan and Ceylon.
To be continued.
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