Barbados has completed its transition to a republican system of government. From today, 30 November, which marks the 55th anniversary of its independence from Britain, Barbados’s head of state is no longer the British Queen. The word ‘royal’ will be removed from the names of its institutions, which will no longer bear the insignia of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. In her place, the tiny Caribbean island has its first elected president, Dame Sandra Mason, who represents the Barbadian struggle for self-determination and whose term won’t last a lifetime.
To many around the world, the move away from the British monarchy is a mature and progressive separation from the island’s former colonial master. For Barbados’s population of just under 300,000, it is a hugely significant period ending more than 400 years of British rule, which included centuries of the most inhumane form of the slave trade.
Barbados was “Britain’s colonial site of the first ‘black slave society’,” notes Hilary Beckles, a Barbadian historian and chairman of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Reparations Commission. “The most systemically violent, brutal and racially inhumane society of modernity”.
