Prescod urges Landship ‘rebirth’, slams ‘commercialisation’

Minister for Pan-African affairs and heritage, Trevor Prescod, has voiced concern that the Barbados Landship — one of the island’s oldest community-based cultural traditions — has become too commercialised and detached from the villages that gave it life.

Speaking on Wednesday at a cultural heritage workshop hosted by the Pinelands Creative Workshop (PCW), Prescod said the movement’s “spiritual embodiment” could only be found in its grassroots origins.

“The landship is shaped by the village… now the landship is an instrument in what we call tourism,” he said, arguing that the tradition had shifted from being woven into everyday village life to becoming a spectacle for national events and visitors.

The Landship, said to have originated in Licorish Village, My Lord’s Hill in 1863, models itself on a “ship” at sea, using naval-style ranks, parades and choreographed manoeuvres to “sail” on land. It traditionally functioned as a working‑class friendly society that offered fellowship, cooperative savings and funeral assistance, while using music, dance and ceremony to strengthen Afro‑Barbadian identity and community life. The tuk band music that accompanies landship manoeuvres was patterned off the drum-and-fife music of the British military.

Prescod pointed to Licorish Village, in his St Michael East constituency, as one of the few remaining communities where the Landship still functions in its original form. “I still believe that the landship should go back to the village occasionally,” he said. “That’s where the spirit and the dynamics of the life that formed the landship itself emerge.”

Recalling older times when community life was filled with local characters and street performances, Prescod reminisced about “the penny whistle man underneath the window playing early in the morning” and other grassroots forms of cultural expression that sustained community bonds.

In a later interview with Barbados TODAY, the minister lamented that “most of the time” the Landship is now showcased for tourism or state events, adding that the movement’s self-sustaining role had been eroded.

He highlighted that the Landship once operated as an economic and social support network — pooling funds through a “susu” or “meeting turn” – that contributed to home construction, and assisting members during bereavement. “It has been commercialised and because it has been commercialised, it is losing its indigenous value,” he said.

Despite these concerns, the Barbados Landship Association is working to expand its reach through school programmes and projects tied to social development. The movement was recently recognised by UNESCO, being placed on its 2003 Convention List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding.

Still, Prescod cautioned that modernisation must not obscure identity and called on PCW to assist in reviving the tradition. 

“It’s not even a case of retaining it now,” he said. “We have to give it a rebirth.” 

(SM)