Barbados: the birth of a new republic
“After 396 years, the sun has set on the British monarchy’s reign over the Caribbean island of Barbados,” said Michael Safi in The Guardian. As the clock struck midnight on Monday, the royal standard representing Queen Elizabeth II was lowered for the last time over National Heroes Square in Bridgetown. Soon after, Dame Sandra Mason – the nation’s former governor-general – was sworn in as president, in a ceremony on the 55th anniversary of independence. The nation once known as “little England”, on account of its “anglophile tendencies”, is the first former British colony to remove the Queen as head of state since Mauritius, in 1992. But it will remain part of the Commonwealth. In an unprecedented move, Prince Charles had accepted an invitation to attend the ceremony. “The creation of this republic offers a new beginning,” he said in his speech. “From the darkest days of our past and the appalling atrocity of slavery, which forever stains our history, people of this island forged their path with extraordinary fortitude.”
For some Barbadians, Charles’s reference to the “stain” of slavery will not have gone far enough, said Kareem Smith on OpenDemocracy. Younger Barbadians are acutely aware of the island’s history as what the historian Hilary Beckles has called the first “black slave society”.
From the settling of British colonists in 1627, hundreds of thousands of West Africans were kidnapped from their homes, and shipped to Barbados to toil in brutal conditions on sugar plantations as the property of British families, who grew rich on their misery. Although this barbarism carried on well into the 19th century, Barbadians retained a residual admiration for the royal family after independence; but that has faded among younger generations, many of whom support calls for reparations.
Not everyone in Barbados is happy about “the breakaway”, said Michael Day in The i Paper. It has been discussed for decades, but there has never been a referendum on the issue; and some think Prime Minister Mia Mottley rushed it through to distract attention from the parlous state of the economy, made worse by Covid and the crash in tourism. Still, “events in Barbados” could send ripples across the Caribbean and beyond. The impact may not be immediate, said Matthew Dennison in The Daily Telegraph: in some of the remaining 14 Commonwealth realms, such discussions are being postponed out of respect for the Queen. Yet as the Crown is for some “indelibly associated with colonialism”, it seems probable that sooner or later, more realms will cut their ties.