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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.