Barbados Becomes a Republic
Barbados removed Elizabeth II as head of state and became a republic at midnight on 30 November 2021, on the fifty-fifth anniversary of its independence. Sandra Mason, the last governor-general, was sworn in as the first president in a ceremony in Bridgetown attended by the Prince of Wales, who spoke of the appalling atrocity of slavery. The island's history made the change a particular kind of statement. Barbados was settled by the English in 1627 and became the first English colony to build its economy on sugar and enslaved African labour, and the Barbados Slave Code of 1661 — which defined the enslaved as chattel property with no protection in law — was copied into Jamaica, the Carolinas and Antigua, and is the legal ancestor of slave codes across the English-speaking Americas. Some 600,000 people were transported to an island of 430 square kilometres. It had been called Little England for a century, and had kept the monarchy for fifty-five years after independence. The transition had been proposed since the 1970s and was announced by Mia Mottley's government in September 2020, with the succession by parliamentary vote rather than referendum — which drew criticism from the opposition on process rather than on principle. The country stayed in the Commonwealth. Rihanna was declared a national hero at the ceremony. Barbados is the first Caribbean state to become a republic since Dominica in 1978, and its move has been watched by Jamaica, Belize and the Bahamas. The government has since pressed the case for reparations from Britain, with the Drax family's Barbadian estates as a specific example.
- Year: 2021 CE
- Category: Political
