Prime Minister Mia Mottley speaking at the United Nations in 2019. Barbados' first Prime Minister, Errol Barrow, declared in a December 1966 address to the UN that the newly independent country would be "friends of all, satellites of none." Photo Copyright (c) 2019.
"Beware.... He'll pour a honeyed potion in your ear, and you'll wake up one day and all you'll say is 'Republic! Republic! Republic!'" Gladiator
WHEN THE GOVERNMENT OF BARBADOS announced in a throne speech September 15 that it would be seeking to make the country a republic by November 2021, the world was jolted.
From Canada to Europe, up and down the Caribbean archipelago, for a few hours in several countries at least, talk was of how the island nation was going to, perhaps at last, do away with the British monarchy.
“Barbados will sich von Queen trennen” read a headline the next day on the German news service tagesschau.de: “Barbados wants to part ways with the Queen.”
Sir Ronald Sanders, commenting in The Barbados Advocate within days of the news, observed “this is the third announcement by a Government of Barbados…that it intends the nation should be a republic, shedding monarchial status and Queen Elizabeth II as Head of State.”
The late prime minister Owen Arthur floated the idea in 2003. Freundel Stuart, another first among equals, flirted with it in 2015.
Now Mia Mottley, presumably possessed of the necessary “votes of not less than two-thirds of all the Members of the House,” and requiring no referendum as in other jurisdictions, seems set to accomplish what her predecessors couldn’t or wouldn’t.
Undeniable—and uncomfortable—truths
Her ruling Barbados Labour Party has 29 of the 30 seats in the House of Assembly. She’s aiming for Barbados’ 55th anniversary of Independence, November 30, 2021, as her target date for the country to become a republic.
The other English-speaking nations in the West Indies that have become republics since their independence are Guyana (1970), Trinidad and Tobago (1976) and Dominica (1978).
Were Bajans shocked by the latest announcement? Not as much as some. Sanders is right: it feels like an old debate of should-we/when-will-we.
What has generated greater airtime on call-in programmes, in the press, and on social media has been the decriminalization of the possession of small amounts of marijuana and a proposal for the recognition of same-sex unions—which were also mentioned in the throne speech delivered by Governor General Dame Sandra Mason.
The truth is many Barbadians have been more concerned with the return of their children to primary and secondary schools as the country continues to manage the realities of COVID-19 on its shores. That has meant a relatively low and stable infection rate (as of this writing, 270 confirmed cases, 249 recovered, 7 deaths for a population of roughly 288,000), and apparently no in-community spread, but all of this requires attention and focus to be maintained.
“At this time, I’m not sure what difference it makes in the long run,” said Destiny King Lavine, 20, a Barbados Community College fine arts student. “We would be like the US—I assume—in how the government would change, but I wonder if Barbados is ready for that.”
Indeed. Despite Biden’s election as the 46th president of the United States earlier this month, the last four years under his gross predecessor, Donald Trump, has reminded the world that even the “strongest” of democracies can go astray regardless the systems in place to guard against abuses of power. It will take much of Biden’s gift as “The Conciliator,” and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris’ cool-headedness, to right the many wrongs perpetrated in the name of making their country great again.
Here at home, some of what I predicted ten years ago in my short story "Massiah" seems to be unfolding. There is still much to remain vigilant against, as other onlookers today in and outside of the press have also made clear.
Opposition Senator Caswell Franklyn called the midterm throne speech a “wasted opportunity, littered with misplaced priorities,” in his view.
“We have over 40,000 people who are unemployed, and they [the government] are concerned with things to make themselves look good. Pray tell me, when we become a republic, how many people will get jobs as a result? Only a few legal draughtspeople, and that’s it. The prime minister has not said what type of president that we are looking to have, and these are things that should not be foisted upon the people,” insisted Franklyn.
The senator’s frustration speaks to those of an age. Verla De Peiza, President of the Democratic Labour Party, “was on board with the idea of Barbados becoming a republic by next year,” according to a Daily Nation report following the announcement, “but added a good first step to shedding the country’s colonial ties would be the removal of Lord Nelson’s statue from [National] Heroes Square” in Bridgetown. The space had been called Trafalgar Square prior to its renaming in 1999.
Nelson finally comes down
Almost on cue, the take-down finally happened in a ceremony November 16, the International Day of Tolerance—an odd choice of day. Had Barbadians been intolerant in wanting the statue removed from its present location? Had they not been tolerant enough in waiting twenty-plus years for its promised repositioning, which is now to be the Barbados Museum?
Or was this a less than subtle reminder that for healing to take hold, it had to happen on all sides of a divide?
While Barbadians have been unavoidably concerned about the global pandemic, water and food security, garbage collection, the current hurricane season, and the loss of tourism and jobs, we also had demonstrations in the Black Lives Matter vein calling for the removal of Nelson.
John King, the minister responsible for culture, announced in July that the statue would at last be removed. Protesters were petitioning for this to happen by Emancipation Day, August 1.
The day came and went, and the statue remained at the head of Broad Street in the nation’s capital, in a space renamed in honour of Barbados’ greatest heroes and heroines, firebrand legislators, abolitionists and emancipators—among which Nelson definitely was not.
Some, like Sunday Sun columnist and spoken word poet Adrian Green, agreed with De Peiza. “This extrication proceeds more slowly than I would like for a few reasons,” he wrote in his column of September 20.
The urgent now?
Martin Luther King, Jr, in his speeches, would remind politicians of “the urgency of now” in addressing the civil rights of African-Americans during the 1950s and 60s. There are those who would argue, even with the pandemic: What could be more urgent than reaffirming Barbadian identity and independence in an age when people the world over have been reevaluating brutal colonial histories and twisted racist narratives?
Barbados is a country that still perceives its power lines to be split along racial divides, with blacks of African descent largely in charge of the branches of government and those one might call nominally white running the economy.
“…[M]any have not changed their colonial mindset and maintain a sentimental attachment to things colonial,” Green insisted in his opinion piece. “They don’t want to venture too far from where this nation started. They believe that sugar should be our bread and butter forever, the educational system we inherited from the British is fine, the sun should not set on Nelson’s statue and that all this republic talk will insult the Queen of England and result in disaster.”
That last point may be the issue, the concern, for many Barbadians, whether they are at home or part of the diaspora. As much as Barbadian-born New York State Judge Sylvia Hinds-Radix called the government’s decision “a progressive step,” citing Barbados’ replacement of the British Privy Council with the Caribbean Court of Justice in 2015 as its final court of appeal, walking the walk can still make people nervous.
It can lead to all kinds of tightrope fears. An overriding one here may be that the racial, social and economic inequalities that divide us will finally tear us apart without certain familiar yet oppressive structures to keep everyone in their place. Plantation style. At the tip of a whip.
More than even legislative success, this may be the reason the process has stalled in the past. Will three times be a charm for Barbados where republic-seeking Caribbean countries like Jamaica and St Vincent and the Grenadines have yet to reach?
“While becoming a republic is regarded by Caribbean intellectuals as ‘rounding the circle of independence,’” admitted Sanders, “the argument is not as much about the head of state not being a white woman living in a distant former colonial power; it is more about good governance when institutions perceived as beneficial are changed.” Or at least it should be.
Last Modified: December 20, 2020.
