The past is not a foreign country. It is the ground beneath our feet, the water in our pipes, the cadence of our speech, the rocking chair in which we once rocked our children to sleep or enthralled with a story – and Barbados is in danger of throwing far too much of it in the skip.
A holocaust of memory
For 400 years, this rock has been a laboratory of empire, resistance and reinvention, yet we still move too fast to respect and understand our own history. When “Granny” dies, her rocking chair – a literal heirloom, crafted by Barbadian hands and polished by generations – too often goes to the dump, or the shipping container, to be copied and rebranded abroad as “British Caribbean” or “British Tropical” furniture and sold back to us at a premium. The same casual vandalism afflicts our sonic heritage: radio in Barbados is 90 years old, yet many, if not most of the crucial recordings that chronicled our passage from colony to democracy have been wiped, binned or simply mislaid.
That erasure is not abstract. We were lucky to capture what turned out to be the last interview with folk historian Trevor Marshall; within months, he, Professors Pedro Welch and Karl Watson – three giants of public history – were gone. Their voices survive because, for once, someone decided that their oral testimony mattered enough to record and keep. “When a man dies, a library burns”. That is not only a poignant metaphor but an urgent policy warning.
Why the spoken word must count
By law, every book published in Barbados must be deposited in the National Library Service. That legal deposit regime is a quiet, revolutionary act: it is an assertion that the written word produced by Barbadians is part of the national estate, not a private trinket. My contention is simple: extend that logic to the spoken word and the sounds of Barbados. Treat aural recordings – of talks, speeches, radio programmes, comedy, storytelling, music and everyday testimony – as seriously as we treat printed books.
This is not a mere nostalgic indulgence. Consider something as prosaic as wash day. When we asked older Barbadians about washing clothes in the first half of the 20th century, we were brought front and centre into one of the great social revolutions of this land. The piping of potable water into villages – an infrastructure that began in Bridgetown in 1861 out of the horror of the 1854 cholera epidemic, which killed around 20,000 people – did more than make laundry easier. It lengthened lives, improved sanitation and slowly raised living standards under the yoke of the British Crown. You will not grasp the human meaning of those pipes from an engineering report; a woman hauling buckets from a standpipe freed her from a longer walk to a murky, unsanitary pond.
Race against time
We used to sell Barbados as a Little England in the tropics. The truth is more brutal and more impressive. This was one of the first and most successful places on earth to perfect an industrial system rooted in a holocaust – plantation slavery – and to sustain it not for five or ten years but for two centuries. Formal emancipation did not end exploitation either. From the 1830s to 1938, labourers were paid a maximum of 24 cents a week – a de facto 100‑year wage freeze – policed by legislation such as the Masters and Servants Act and the Located Labourers Act. The same ingenuity that laid out cane fields and aqueducts was deployed to keep Black Barbadians “in their place”.
Yet our people were never the inferior beings depicted in Professor John Meiklejohn’s textbook, A Short History of England and Great Britain, a staple of colonial classrooms which insisted that civilisation flowed in only one direction, from metropole to plantation. Men came back from the First World War and from digging the Panama Canal with pockets full of silver and heads full of new ideas, determined to buy land, educate their children and build what would become the Black middle class. Parents slaughtered pigs and sold their few possessions to pay as much as $28 a term so that their children could attend secondary school. Those sacrifices, not imperial benevolence, underpinned the arrival of free secondary education in the 1950s and the opening of schools like St Leonard’s, Princess Margaret and West St Joseph (now Grantley Adams Memorial).
The 1950s, in particular, deserve to be recognised as one of the great hinge decades in Barbadian life. It was the decade of universal adult suffrage, cabinet government, the spread of electricity and piped water into homes, the growth of trade unions, the slow accommodation of white power to Black majority aspirations, a political federation, and the wiring of schools for Rediffusion, which ultimately brought schools broadcasting into the classroom and school hall. It is also the decade in which impatient younger Barbadians created a new political party to nudge aside the “old man” Grantley Adams, just as the British had to nudge aside Winston Churchill. To capture that period now, from the mouths of those who lived it, is not optional; it is a race against time.
The university of the rocking chair
Any serious attempt to preserve our history must begin with our language. Kamau Brathwaite taught us to call it Nation Language, not “broken English”, and Richard Allsopp showed, in his dictionary, that Barbadian Creole English has structure, rules and a history that links us to both Bristol and Accra. When I tell someone to “mek case”, I am echoing “make haste”, a phrase that arrived on these shores with the crew of the Olive Blossom in 1625, speaking the maritime English of King James’s Britain. When I invite “wunna” to listen, I am in the same breath recognising the kinship with “unnu” that Igbo speakers would recognise from Nigeria.
As with other aspects of our culture, there is schizophrenia at work in our attitude to Bajan English. We exploit it to sell products and to make jokes, then look down our long noses at it in the classroom and the boardroom. Yet we navigate our world through code‑switching; as Allsopp wryly noted, the person who goes into the market and asks: “At what price are those bananas?” is more likely to be cheated than the one who asks: “How the bananas selling?” The home is the crucible of Nation Language. We learned it in the same rocking chairs where our mothers and grandmothers tell us stories and proverbs; the school’s task is not to eradicate that speech but to equip them with another register, Caribbean Standard English, as a tool for communication in a wider world.
Proverbs, those condensed nuggets of ancestral wisdom, are an African gift that keeps on giving. Our folk characters – Ossie Moore and Gearbox included – and the jokes, riddles and sayings that surround them are not mere entertainment; they are a philosophy of survival, a map of our moral universe. Any archive that pretends to speak for Barbados but excludes Bajan speech, humour and proverb is not an archive but a mausoleum.
A digital library for our civilisation
We live in what we like to call the Digital Millennium, but our digital habits are too often shallow: a scroll, a like, a cat video; here now, gone in seconds. A serious digital culture requires institutions that do what our national library has done since 1847 – collect, catalogue, preserve and make accessible – but now for audio as well as print.
Sound has advantages the book does not. It is portable and affordable, available on any smartphone, and it uses only a few megabytes rather than megawatts.
Like books, it travels wherever we go; like books, it creates mental pictures, except that in audio the listener owns and operates the images. It makes low demands on time and attention.
Radio, in that sense, is for the ears what books are for the eyes.
This work cannot stop at our shoreline. Barbados has been lived as intensely in New York, London, Toronto, Panama and Curaçao as it has been in St Lucy or Bayfield. Writers like Paule Marshall in the US and Austin “Tom” Clarke in Canada have inscribed that diasporic experience in literature; Brathwaite did so in poetry and criticism.
But the “great unexamined lives” of ordinary Barbadians abroad – the woman who scrubbed floors under a “No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs” sign, the man who dodged Teddy boys in Notting Hill, the cousin of mine who drove Garry Sobers around England in the 1960s – are just as valuable. Their testimonies can and should be captured in careful conversations recorded on a phone, deposited with the library, and curated both for public listening and for historians who will need some of that material to remain sealed for decades.
We already know, from listening to elder Barbadians at home, that their memories are not of some sugar‑coated “good old days”. They speak plainly of grinding poverty, struggle, making do without, alongside the warmth of close‑knit communities and mutual aid. That sober realism is precisely what future generations will need if they are to make sense of the choices we face now: how we respond to debt, climate change, inequality, constitutional reform, and the unfinished business of reparations.
Reparations as repair – and responsibility
Reparations is one of those words that instantly fogs the public debate. Too many people hear “payout” and “grab”, a crude zero‑sum tussle over land and cheques. I prefer to focus on the root of the word: repair. What needs repairing in Barbados is understanding – our grasp of how a small island became a crucible for industrialised slavery, then a test case for managed freedom, and now a republic still carrying the scars and legacies of both.
Telling the origin story of Barbados honestly is not about wallowing in victimhood or stoking retribution. It is about facing the violence at the heart of the imperial project and, in the same breath, celebrating the endurance and creativity of the people who survived it.
A civilisation that has taken this much punishment and still produced literature, music, scholarship, humour and one of the highest literacy rates in the Caribbean is an achievement in its own right.
If we refuse to record and transmit that story, we invite Mark Twain’s dictum to take hold: history will not repeat itself, but it will rhyme – and the rhyme schemes of mass forgetting are rarely pleasant.
We have choices. We can either fashion a society that tosses its memories into the dustbin, creating a vacuum into which all manner of ugliness can flow, or we can decide that the written and spoken words of Barbadians – at home and abroad, famous and obscure – are a common inheritance worth a modest investment of equipment, will and time.
In that sense, the real question is not whether Barbados can afford a comprehensive national audio archive. It is whether, after everything our forebears endured to drag this society from cane‑piece to classroom, we can afford not to build one.
Enter Radio Bimshire
My own role in all of this is both practical and evangelical. I was invited by the National Library Service to train its officers in how to conduct oral history interviews, to take them beyond the odd recorded lecture or commemorative event into a systematic project of capturing the voices of Barbadians across class, geography and vocation.
Out of that work – beginning with a deceptively simple series on “wash day” and expanding to include public historians, community elders, clergy, scientists and ordinary workers – grew the idea of knitting these recordings together with modern streaming technology so that they could be heard anywhere, by anyone, in the same way that a library book can be taken off a shelf by any member of the public.
That is how I came to design and curate what we now call Radio Bimshire: not a radio station, but an online streaming and podcasting service framed deliberately as an extension of the library’s mandate into the realm of sound.
Radio Bimshire is quite deliberately as an answer to the “holocaust of memory” that has already cost Barbados so many irreplaceable recordings and personal archives. Its purpose is to treat audio as a form of legal deposit for the ear: a free, non‑commercial space where the sounds of Barbados – its histories, comedies, proverbs, music, literature and reflections at home and in the diaspora – can be collected, cared for and made available, now and in the future.
In doing so, it offers a practical way for Barbadians to resist the twin temptations of amnesia and export: instead of our stories being wiped, lost in skips, or repackaged and sold back to us from elsewhere, they can be lodged in a national digital commons that honours both the written and the spoken word.
Listen to Radio Bimshire at http://bit.ly/RadioBimshire
For podcasts, search “Radio Bimshire Presents” on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music and Audible
Read my interview with friend and colleague John Stevenson here: https://share.google/O6eSAn8w06CNqzJVc