Photo: ABC Foreign Correspondent: Matt Henry. Retrieved from abc.net.au
For nearly 400 years, sugar cane has been harvested in the fields of Drax Hall. James Drax, a young Englishman who arrived in Barbados shortly after it was claimed by Britain in 1625, was among the first to experiment with the unproven crop. He found, as Marshall puts it, “like love and marriage, horse and carriage, Barbados and sugar cane go well together.” James Drax soon struck it rich.
But it wasn’t just an agricultural experiment. “This is the place where the business model of using slaves on our tropical farms, which we call plantations … this is where it was created,” says Marshall. Another Barbadian historian, Hilary Beckles, says as many as 327 slaves, both adults and children, worked on the plantation at its height. The death rate was horrific.
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Reparations have been debated in Barbados for generations, but in the past decade the conversation has moved from the political fringes into the mainstream. Today, Barbados is one of the Caribbean’s loudest voices calling for compensation for the horrors of slavery.
David Comissiong was a young lawyer back in the early 90s when he first started pushing for the idea to be taken seriously. At the time, he was dismissed as “a dreamer,” he says from behind his desk in Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in the capital Bridgetown.
There’s a “big difference” between then and now. “This is a conversation whose time has come,” he says, rapping his fingertips on the desk.