How Barbados became a leader in Caribbean calls for reparations

Kim Howard made her way to the Barbados National Archive last month in search of family history – and answers. Delicately paging through fragile tomes in the sparsely decorated, coral-stone former sanitarium, she found herself face to face with a document naming her enslaved great-great-great-grandfather: Cato, 5. 

The record was from 1796, so Cato would have been about 9 years old, says the marketing professional, who remembers wondering why it had him listed as 5. 

Then it hit her: “This 9-year-old, my relative, was valued at £5,” she says. 

The West Indies were home to hundreds of years of a brutal system of enslaved labor, which funded the European Industrial Revolution and much of its subsequent wealth and development. More than 65% of enslaved Africans in the Americas worked on plantations in the Caribbean. Referred to as “Little England,” tiny Barbados was one of the most valuable British colonies, where it enslaved an estimated half-million people who were used to plant, grow, cut, and process sugar cane – white gold. It “perfected” reliance on slave labor for plantation crops by instituting one of the first slave labor codes, a legal framework England exported to its colonies, including the United States.

Nearly 200 years since emancipation and 60 since independence from England, Barbados has emerged as a leading voice for reparations for slavery. Activists and academics feel their work has finally gained traction: This year alone, the Church of England and University of Glasgow issued formal apologies and pledged monetary reparations for their role in the transatlantic slave trade. Descendants of those who profited from enslavement are advocating governmental reparations and setting an example for making individual amends. One family publicly apologized and pledged £100,000 – about $125,000 – to nearby Grenada in February. And since Barbados’ move to become a republic in 2021, no longer recognizing the British monarchy as symbolic head of state, there’s renewed pressure on the crown to take a formal stand. At the ceremony in Barbados, then-Prince Charles became the first of the royal family to formally lament the “appalling atrocity of slavery.”

Still, the reparations conversation doesn’t come easily for many Barbadians.

“I feel torn and mixed up,” says Ms. Howard, who moderates a Barbadian genealogy Facebook group. “Was there an injustice done? Absolutely. Do we have examples in history where people wrongly done by got reparations? Yes.

“My question is, what would it look like?” she adds. 

Unlike in the U.S., where discussions trip over putting a price tag on what’s owed to individuals, the emphasis here is on the communal. As part of the Caribbean Community, a 15-state organization, Barbados has called for a “full and formal apology” from European governments. And it’s put the monetary emphasis on investments that would benefit the entire, majority-Black population, regardless of an individual’s links to enslaved people or enslavers. That includes areas from public health and education to technology and infrastructure. The approach says much about the structures of inequality and racism that endure.

“Our story is the story of resistance,” says David Comissiong, Barbados’ ambassador to the Caribbean Community and deputy chair of the regional reparations task force. “We’ve done tremendous things with what little was left to us. But at the same time, because of that history, that hundreds of years of looting and plundering of resources, there are material gaps in our state of physical development that need to be corrected. 

“This is the era of reparations,” he adds.

Meaningful connections

Barbados has made a name for itself, creating a national reparations task force in 2012 and participating in the Caribbean Community’s groundbreaking 2014 reparations plan. It landed in the international spotlight recently for calls targeting wealthy Britons for individual reparations – like movie star Benedict Cumberbatch and conservative member of Parliament Richard Drax, whose family still runs its 17th-century plantation here. 

Reparations are millennia old, created as a way of ending conflict between clans by paying blood money, says Luke Moffett, an expert on reparations and human rights law at Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland. “It was a way of settling the past and not letting it fester.” 

In the modern context, reparations are largely political. When the public does get directly involved, it can carry its own form of healing, says Dr. Moffett: “Citizen involvement can help chart a way forward rather than being burdened with the past.” 

In Barbados you don’t have to look far to see structural injustices carried forward since slavery – from an overstretched public health system to the changing climate that’s brought longer hurricane seasons and sargassum seaweed. Officials here directly link these repercussions of global warming to actions of industrialized nations, like former colonizers. 

While governments chip away at calls for reparations from Europe, “we as individuals can seek self-reparations – through genealogy and the reconstitution of families, reconnecting with our history, repairing trauma,” says Pedro Welch, a historian. He built a home on the sliver of land miraculously purchased and passed down by his formerly enslaved great-great-great-grandfather, John Thomas Brewster. Dr. Welch gestures to a mammee apple tree that he suspects could have been there since Brewster’s first taste of freedom. 

On a recent, breezy evening, a pounding African-drum beat seeps out of the Haynesville Youth Club rehearsal space where young girls stand three lines deep. Their dance instructor calls out, “Tell yourself, ‘I am important. I have purpose.’” 

The girls understand: They tuck their bottoms, push back their shoulders, and stand tall in first position. “You can’t fake it. You have to believe it,” he continues, calling on the group to move into second position while young boys sit along the wall banging out the unconventional ballet soundtrack.

These are all lessons meant to go far beyond biweekly classes, addressing negative stereotypes that persist around African culture and descendance, particularly in low-income zones, like this one. This community center used to be a police outpost, with a bird’s-eye view to surveil the community of candybox-colored single-family homes.  

“The legacy of the Barbadian people is that of our ancestors. The very fact that, with all they were facing, they fought back, stood up and resisted slavery and all the horrors: They were resilient people,” says Rodney Grant, a member of Barbados’ reparations task force. “These were some of the things they passed on to us – the people who then, when they were free to form a government, even though still under colonial rule, did so with pure resilience. It was the same energy to fight back, create something from nothing.”

The youth club and other grassroots groups on the island work to empower and unite communities through academics, entrepreneurship, culture, and the arts. 

“Using arts, sports, and culture as a means to transform society is another way of emancipating people. This is a form of repair,” says Sophia Greaves-Broome, CEO of the Pinelands Creative Workshop, a community-development organization. “[Local] reparations are already underway.”

Damian, the father of one of the young dancers, waits outside. He wants his daughter to feel proud of where she comes from. “Information is passed down through culture. Whether it’s drumming or dance, there are always traces of slavery in that,” he says, asking that his last name not be used. 

He firmly favors reparations. But he works in the service industry and fears that his mostly white clients could be offended by the idea. “I don’t know how whites think about reparations,” he says, though he acknowledges the term is better understood here now than even a decade ago. 

Barbados is 96% Black or multiracial; 2.7% of the population identifies as white.

Giving a history of Barbados to a group of Black and white foreigners on a recent morning, a tour guide in downtown Bridgetown said that “she wanted to be sure to mention” it wasn’t just Europeans participating in the slave trade, but Africans as well. “I don’t want to offend anyone,” she later explained. “[Reparation] sounds nice, but we’re so [racially] mixed on the island, I don’t see how it would be fair.”

For Justin Went, a young Black businessperson, slavery ended too long ago to keep bringing it up and asking people “who had nothing to do with it” to repent. 

“Blacks built Barbados,” says Kazziah, a school monitor who declined to give her last name. “But today I think we’re too busy trying to make ends meet to really think much about getting reparations for what was taken,” she says, sipping spiced sorrel at a sunset picnic.

Making the “ask” mainstream  

Part of the work of Barbados’ reparations committee is to make the topic more familiar and mainstream. It’s a work in progress, say members of the committee, past and present. But even before the town hall meetings, TV specials, and social media campaigns, there was the need to talk more openly about the history of slavery itself.

“Discussing the past means we remember what happened to our people,” says Dr. Welch, a previous chair of Barbados’ reparations task force. “There was a time when our people were considered inferior, and some of our older Barbadians aren’t too interested in bringing up that past.” 

As a British colony, Barbados created the first slave laws, which codified violence against enslaved people, defining them as chattel property. Slavery legally ended in British colonies in 1834, but an “apprenticeship” program, which said enslaved people had to learn to be free citizens, meant they weren’t fully emancipated until 1838. Structural limitations persisted, universal suffrage wasn’t introduced until 1950, and it wasn’t until 1980 that renters on plantation outskirts were able to purchase land.

Following emancipation, Britain raised funds to pay enslavers for their “lost property” (freed slaves), a tab of billions of pounds in today’s currency, which the British government only finished paying in 2015. 

“You don’t have to look very hard to see we are only recently emerging from the shadows of the enslavement period,” Dr. Welch, the historian, says.

On a sweltering afternoon, historian Kevin Farmer dribbles rum on the sacred grounds of the Newton burial site, paying respects to 600 enslaved Barbadians interred here. A sun-crisped, grass hill near Bridgetown, it’s the only slave burial site discovered in Barbados. Experts have identified family plots and individuals interred with personal objects, like jewelry and earthenware that pin personal details to a population deliberately stripped of its humanity. 

“It’s allowed us to knit back together some of the understanding and intimacy slavery erased,” says Mr. Farmer, deputy director of the Barbados Museum & Historical Society. “To know where we’re going, we need to understand the past.” 

How slavery is taught in schools has changed dramatically, moving away from the narrative of European “discovery” and cash crops to one that includes chronicles of local slave rebellions and resistance. The increased awareness has led to tangible shifts, like the removal of a statue of Lord Horatio Nelson in 2020, which stood in Bridgetown’s National Heroes Square for two centuries. He was a pro-slavery British war hero. 

A new monument designed to take its place celebrates the breaking of slavery’s shackles, reunification of families after emancipation, and national heroes who represent Barbadian resilience and resistance. 

Hugh Holder and Vincent Jones – designers of the new work – hope the project sparks conversations. 

“We want every Barbadian to see themselves in the monument. But like any country, Barbados is constantly changing,” says Mr. Jones. “There were generations of people who put up with the Nelson statue and didn’t see anything wrong with it.” 

Starting a bigger process 

At dusk on a recent Friday, Ms. Howard cautiously walks a gravel road on the Chapel Plantation, part of present-day Carrington Estates Ltd. Thanks to historical documents, she knows her great-great-great-grandfather Cato toiled here when he was 9 years old. When she thinks about her enslaved relatives like Cato, she doesn’t let her mind wander too far into how they suffered. That part’s a given.

“Was he a nice man? Was he kind to his wife and kids?” she asks. “I don’t have the answers to those questions. What did he look like?”

Identifying ancestors and piecing together their stories has made her more aware of the possibility of reparations. A genuine apology for enslavement would be a start, but investment is important, too, she says: “It could go toward another university or funding for a series of schools, or simply a way to provide better training for teachers. 

“It would be a good, just way to help everyone.”

This story was produced as part of a special Monitor series exploring the reparations debate, in the United States and around the world. Explore more.