—As Barbados Prime Minister Calls for Liberia Culture Knowledge Transfer

IPNEWS: Thousands of descendants of Barbados, including Prime Minister Mia Mottley, were thrilled by cultural display of Liberian arts on Thursday at the climax of the inaugural festival of the ‘Sankofa Back2Barados Pilgrimage’.

Liberia’s cultural Ambassador Juli Endee, in her usual style thrilled the audience with historical songs of Liberia, alongside artistic artifacts depicting life on ‘lemongrass street, Crozierville Township, Republic of Liberia’, home to descendants of Barbados that moved on a voyage to Liberia in the late 1860s.

Ambassador Endee also held a sideline roundtable presentation and discussion on the meaningful roles descendants of Barbados played in the transformation of the nation state into one of the prosperous nations on the African continent.

The sidelines symposium was followed by a musical and Cultural extravaganza display involving Liberia arts and culture together with cultural display of Barbados, to the delight of Prime Minister Mia Mottley, and scores of other members of the ‘The Africa-Barbados Heritage Initiative’ (TABHI).

TABHI is the Foundation founded by Ambassador Witherspoon dedicated to memorializing and promoting the role played by emigrants from Barbados to Liberia, as well as laying the cornerstone for the building of strategic relations between families across West Africa, those in the diaspora and Barbados.

Prime Minister Mottley called for stronger ties with Africa, especially Liberia’s lineage to 19th-century Barbados. Mottley unveiled a plaque in Bay Street on Thursday to mark this year’s Sankofa Pilgrimage, as hundreds of Liberians visited the island this week to explore their ancestral roots.

She told attendees that while the two nations share historical connections – Barbados produced two former Liberian presidents – this relationship has not been fully embraced over the years.

“The fact that we were able to formally establish those linkages only recently is regrettable, but what must matter is not that these two voyages stand as exceptions, but they must simply be seen as foundations,” she said.

Stressing the importance of improving relations, the prime minister added: “It’s about time, as we have said, and Barbados stands ready to work with our African partners to build that transportation bridge, and that bridge of the sharing of information, and the bridge of the common curriculum that would allow our people to be able to know our common history.”

She called for both nations to move past historical, social and political achievements and instead pursue equal justice, especially for those overlooked by the west too often.

“I say to you publicly, that you own as Liberians, part of the pride that we own as Barbadians for making this final step of charting our destiny,” Mottley said. “The story of Liberia is also the story that Barbadians must come to understand because it is also a story of life, the story of humans and the story of civilization.”

She urged both countries not to take stability and prosperity for granted, warning: “As we traverse this path of nation-building in both countries, let us not take stability and prosperity for granted. Because, like a house, if we don’t maintain it each and every day, as easy as it has come to us would be as easy as it shall be taken from us.

“Today signals that they are on both sides of the Atlantic, people who are willing to cement themselves together in unity, to fight the battles not just in our individual countries, but in our regions, and our planet.”

Two of Liberia’s presidents – Arthur Barclay, the 15th president who ruled from 1904 to 1912, and Edwin Barclay, the 18th president from 1943 to 1944 – were descendants of a single voyage of Barbadians in 1865.

Liberia was founded in 1822 by freed Blacks from the United States and became a destination for the repatriation of formerly enslaved people, achieving independence in 1847.

In 1865, 27 years after emancipation, a group of 346 Black Barbadians boarded a ship named The Cora at the Bridgetown wharf for a 34-day Atlantic voyage to the West African nation.

Among the passengers on board The Cora was Anthony Barclay, the leader of the repatriation group, and his wife Sarah Ann Bourne-Barclay, daughter of London Bourne, the ex-slave who became a wealthy merchant and abolitionist. Among the Barclays’ 11 children was the youngest, Arthur Barclay who would become president.

Ancestry tracing at the Barbados Archives will be one of the many heritage-related activities participants will indulge in during the pilgrimage.

According to the website back2barbados.com, Africa and the Caribbean are intimately connected through threads of blood, shared heritage and history. Within the larger context, the story of Africa and Barbados is one of opposites – pain, suffering and eventual joy – that began with slavery during the Sugar Revolution in the 1600s and led to freedom in the 1800s. In 1636, a political directive provided that all Africans brought to the island were to be received as lifelong chattels. Shipment of slaves from Africa to the broader Caribbean had begun at least a century earlier. Altogether, for three and a half centuries, African captives from the Bight of Biafra, Gold Coast, Bight of Benin, West Central Africa and South-eastern Africa were carried across the Atlantic in slave ships originating in European ports. Following the passage in 1834 of the Slavery Abolition Act by the British Empire a year earlier, slavery was abolished in Barbados.

Free African-Barbadians had begun returning to Africa as missionaries or in search of freedom in the years surrounding Emancipation. However, it wasn’t until 1864 that a large-scale plan for emigration was put into action. In 1864, an offer of citizenship and fertile land by the President of Liberia to “brethren of the Antilles” (as the Caribbean was then called) was made, and the Barbados Company for Liberia agitated for financial support from the American Colonization Society. This led to the first – and only recorded – post-Emancipation organized mass emigration of African-Barbadians to Liberia in 1865. The brig CORA sailed from Bridgetown to Monrovia on April 6, 1865 carrying 346 persons (roughly 50 families), 260 of which were settled in Crozierville, which has since been hailed as a Bajan outpost in Africa. Two of Liberia’s presidents, Arthur Barclay and his nephew, Edwin Barclay, were of Bajan descent, as was the longest serving First Lady of the 20th century, Antoinette Padmore Tubman. The township, where dozens of Barbadians proudly built homes, churches, schools, and community, still exists today.

Descendants of Barbadian emigrants in Liberia have been researching the origins of their families in Barbados for quite some time. Some useful resources included the 1965 Centennial Address of Mr. Burleigh Holder, “A History of Crozierville”, the doctoral thesis and 2019 book of academic Caree Banton, More Auspicious Shores: Barbadian Migration to Liberia, Blackness, and the Making of an African Republic and numerous related publications by archaeologist Dr Matt Reilly, in addition to his archaeological digs related to the Back-to-Africa Heritage and Archaeology project.