California visitor creates heritage travel initiative inspired by Barbados

When California native Rufiena Jones first arrived in Barbados in 2022, she expected little more than a tropical getaway. Instead, she found what she describes as a missing chapter in the story of the African diaspora—and a calling to help others rediscover it.

“The day I landed, I knew I was supposed to come back and I knew I was supposed to bring people with me,” Jones recalled.

Now on her eighth visit to the island, Jones has transformed that personal conviction into the Sankofa Wellness Project, a heritage tourism initiative founded in 2022 that introduces members of the African diaspora to Barbados not simply as a Caribbean destination, but as an essential part of understanding their history, identity and cultural roots.

“I always say that if we want to know our past as descendants of Africa, we can’t leave the Caribbean out. We must come here. We must experience the culture here and hear the stories here because this is a major part,” she said.

Jones said she believes many members of the African diaspora understandably look first to countries such as Ghana or Senegal when tracing their ancestry. However, she argues that Barbados and the wider Caribbean preserve traditions, customs and lived experiences that are equally important to understanding the journey of enslaved Africans and the cultures they rebuilt across the Atlantic.

Her Sankofa Wellness Project, soon to become Sankofa Heritage Travel, has already brought groups of visitors to the island for key calendar events, including the Food and Rum Festival and Crop Over, taking them on cultural excursions, historical tours and community experiences designed to deepen their understanding of their African heritage.

Jones welcomed her first group of clients to Barbados in November 2025, bringing 11 visitors alongside two members of the Barbados Association of Southern California, who had won flights through the Barbados Tourism Marketing Inc.’s We Gatherin’ Southern California initiative. She returned this year with three Californians to experience the Crop Over festival.

Search for truth and connection

“I didn’t know Barbados had such a rich history…”

Rufiena Jones (right) meets Barbadian cultural icon The Mighty Gabby during the 2023 Emancipation Day celebrations.

Before visiting the island, she admitted she had little awareness of Barbados’ central role in the transatlantic slave trade. Learning that hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans were brought to the island fundamentally changed her understanding of Caribbean history and Barbados’ place within it.

“I didn’t know Barbados had such a rich history,” she said. “I saw an atlas maybe about two years ago and it mapped out the number of Africans who were enslaved… and it showed the number of Africans who were brought to Barbados. We don’t necessarily learn that.”

“So to be here, the way that it feels here, the way that I can feel and sense this deep, rich African connection… I know that there’s a story here that needs to be told that the diaspora needs to hear and engage with.”

She later learned that Barbados became one of Britain’s earliest and most influential slave societies, shaping plantation systems throughout the Caribbean. That history has since become central to the experiences she curates, which is why the Emancipation-Crop Over season features prominently in her itineraries.

As a former Fulbright scholar who spent almost a year teaching in Thailand, Jones has long viewed travel as an opportunity to understand different cultures. Yet she said Barbados offered something she had not experienced elsewhere.

While quick to acknowledge she is still learning and does not consider herself a historian, she said she recognised African influences beneath centuries of British colonialism—in movement, music, language and expressions of community.

Expanding the mission

Those experiences ultimately inspired the Sankofa Wellness Project, an initiative that invites members of the African diaspora to experience Barbados through its people, traditions and cultural heritage rather than conventional travel and sightseeing.

“When you get underneath that, you see those roots,” she said. “It just looks and feels different because it’s tropical. That body positivity… that movement and whining the waist is there. It’s just a part of the big puzzle of the diaspora.”

Jones, a lifelong dancer who has spent decades studying Afro-Cuban, Afro-Brazilian, Afro-Haitian and traditional West African dance, hopes Barbados will become the starting point for a broader journey linking the Caribbean, West Africa and communities such as the Gullah Geechee people of South Carolina:

“I want to keep expanding it. I want to keep people coming to the Caribbean so that after that we can go to West Africa and see those cultural connections and then also go to the south of the United States… It’s one big story.”

(LM)