How Barbados became a leader in Caribbean calls for reparations

Kim Howard made her way to the Barbados National Archive last month in search of family history – and answers. Delicately paging through fragile tomes in the sparsely decorated, coral-stone former sanitarium, she found herself face to face with a document naming her enslaved great-great-great-grandfather: Cato, 5. 

The record was from 1796, so Cato would have been about 9 years old, says the marketing professional, who remembers wondering why it had him listed as 5. 

Then it hit her: “This 9-year-old, my relative, was valued at £5,” she says. 

The West Indies were home to hundreds of years of a brutal system of enslaved labor, which funded the European Industrial Revolution and much of its subsequent wealth and development. More than 65% of enslaved Africans in the Americas worked on plantations in the Caribbean. Referred to as “Little England,” tiny Barbados was one of the most valuable British colonies, where it enslaved an estimated half-million people who were used to plant, grow, cut, and process sugar cane – white gold. It “perfected” reliance on slave labor for plantation crops by instituting one of the first slave labor codes, a legal framework England exported to its colonies, including the United States.

Nearly 200 years since emancipation and 60 since independence