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Late on Monday night, local time, Barbados will declare itself a republic, becoming the first nation to remove Queen Elizabeth II as its head of state in nearly three decades.
Reclassified under British law as property, the men, women and children who worked the cane fields of Barbados were subject to unimaginable brutality. The first systematic study of the health of those buried at the Newton Slave Burial Ground found the average life expectancy of those examined was 18 years old, with the lives of women thought to be especially appalling: until then, no lower mean age of death had been documented among enslaved females anywhere in the world.
“Barbados was a hellhole,” Comissiong says. “For black people, Barbados was a brutal, hellish society.”
Asked what the crown means to him, Downes is clear. “It signifies a time when people who looked like me … were almost considered just a part in the process of generating wealth,” he says. “Humanity was not considered. Civil rights were not considered.”
