In our nation, the long walk to freedom has been pockmarked by the world’s first brutal law to codify the enslavement of the majority of the population, waves of violent oppression, revolt and reprisal, and a movement to ameliorate and finally abolish slavery in 1834.
But the rebellion of July 1937 was the final slave revolt of all, as the descendants of the newly emancipated brought an end to a further century of legally enforced neo-slavery and a wage freeze.
Ultimately, the law and public policy changes to a system of governance, universal suffrage would combine from the 1940s until Independence to right the wrongs of 300 years of institutionalised, systemic and state-sanctioned slavery. Since 1966, we have done more than most nations accursed by slavery to create a nation where children can grow up free and free from the spectre of the past.
But what is past is but prologue. The essence of our long, storied struggle for bread, justice and freedom is the struggle itself – the countless martyrs, known by some and unknown to most, who rose against the whip and the chain, the bonded labour contract and the wretchedness of oppression and injustice.
This is the story of the freest black nation on Earth that was once the first organised 24-hour slave economy on Earth.
So, then, with a protest organised by civil society against the affliction of racial degradation anywhere in the world – whether it be apartheid, the American civil rights movement, racially charged police brutality in the African Diaspora or the Windrush debacle, it is in the public interest of the State of Barbados to expressly align itself with the cause of freedom for the descendants of those who took the same trips on the same ships.
Yet, once again, despite the near-axiomatic logic that a free black state should champion the freedom of black people everywhere, we have witnessed an embarrassing act of fumbling by the authorities over the latest demonstration of solidarity with our brothers and sisters elsewhere.
The abrupt halting of Saturday’s Black Lives Matter demo over allegations that more than the allowed ten people showed up to join the protest given the COVID-19 public health emergency was a shambolic example of tone-deaf leadership. For which protest could even fathom a mere ten people’s participation given the history we have enumerated here?
Sadly, the Barbadian self-conscious struggle within to even acknowledge the scourge of racism still lives.
In the 1960s, while white British housewives protested against the evil of racial separation and subjugation by boycotting South Africa’s Outspan oranges, black Barbadian migrant shoppers scoffed, saying they would not be put off buying cheaper fruit, as the late historian and pan-Africanist Leroy Harewood noted during his student days in the UK.
We would later witness the debate over the employment of rebel West Indians – the vast majority of whom were Barbadian – to play cricket by apartheid South Africa.
A decade earlier, the Black Power movement of the early 1970s earned the ire of black Caribbean politicians, among them the Right Excellent Errol Barrow who passed the Public Order Act of 1970, the legalised quelling of dissent whose legacy is the requirement to apply to the Commissioner of Police for permission to stage a demonstration.
Not only did the current commissioner fail to act decisively under the same authority vested in him by that law but he punted the ball to the Attorney General, citing public health concerns that he could have easily ascertained from a consultation with the Ministry of Health.
Now we come to the central thesis of Dr Deryk Murray, the last chairman of the since-disbanded Commission on Pan-African Affairs: the silence of official Barbados is deafening during the clarion call everywhere for justice, peace, freedom and freedom from fear after 400 years of the black experience in the United States.
The Prime Minister, in particular, has on no fewer than a half-dozen occasions, witnessed by leaders and officials of the world community and millions of viewers worldwide, called for leadership, moral and political, for environmental and economic justice for small island nations and coastal states in the South.
In the face of weekend platitudes from the Embassy of the United States that are diametrically opposed to the hourly, weekly and daily assaults on the moral high ground by the American head of state, no Government of Barbados should dither, equivocate or vacillate on the great unanswered question of the age: when will all black lives matter?
But we expect more than diplomatic triangulation and rhetorical flourishes. We believe our history and daily experience is clear: all black lives matter here. We have succeeded in demonstrating to the world with lightning speed in historical terms that in Barbados, all, not some lives matter here.
We have much to teach the world. We have redressed rather than avenged past wrongs and we are further along the road to economic liberation for all because we began to liberate the minds of all, regardless of the circumstances of birth.
And we should use the opportunity to declare that not only do black lives matter but they also have worth and recommit ourselves to the unfinished struggle against the iniquity of inequity, the chasm of equality that yet threatens to derail the long walk to freedom.
