Introducing TABHI: Who We Are, and Why This Work Matters

Welcome to The Journal — and, for many of you, welcome to The Africa Barbados Heritage Initiative for the first time. As we launch our website to the world, we want to begin where every good story begins: with who we are, where we come from, and why this work matters.

A voyage that began in 1865

On 6 April 1865, some 347 free Black Barbadians — roughly 72 family groups — boarded the brig CORA at Bridgetown Harbour. Invited by President Daniel Bashiel Warner of Liberia, they were not refugees fleeing hardship. They were pioneers, choosing to build something new on African soil, in what was then the continent's only independent Black republic.

They settled at Crozierville, in Montserrado County. They built churches, opened schools, and raised children who would go on to lead their adopted nation. Among the lineages carried by the CORA are names still documented today: the Barclays, Portes, Padmores, Goodridges, Eastmans, Weeks, Carrs, and Thorpes. Remarkably, three descendants of these families became heads of state of Liberia — Presidents Arthur Barclay and Edwin Barclay, and Charles Gyude Bryant, who chaired the National Transitional Government after the country's civil war.

For 160 years, the two halves of this story — Barbados and Liberia — lived apart.

What TABHI does

The Africa Barbados Heritage Initiative is a registered Liberian nonprofit organisation, with Minnesota 501(c)(3) status pending. We are chartered to memorialise the 1865 emigration, document the descendant lineages of the CORA's passenger families, and anchor the bilateral heritage relationship between Barbados, Liberia, and the global African diaspora.

In practice, that means several things at once: maintaining a living genealogical archive that grows family by family; producing documentary and educational content that tells these stories with care; facilitating pilgrimages of return that reconnect descendants with their ancestral homes; and advancing heritage diplomacy at the highest levels. Our archival programme begins with the Porte-Best line — the lineage of our Founder, Ambassador Witherspoon — and extends outward to all of the roughly fifty emigrant families.

A year that changed everything

In 2024, the Sankofa Pilgrimage to Barbados brought more than 500 Barbadian-Africans and their families back to the island. It was more than a homecoming. It produced a signed Barbados–Liberia Visa Waiver Agreement and formally established TABHI as the institutional anchor of this heritage connection. That agreement was signed in Monrovia on 18 March 2026, eliminating visa requirements for Barbadian nationals travelling to Liberia and establishing a framework for ongoing political consultation between the two nations.

Why now — and why you

We launch this platform because memory, left undocumented, fades. Records scatter. Family lines blur. The descendants of the CORA are spread today across Liberia, Barbados, Sierra Leone, the United States, the United Kingdom, and beyond — and the work of holding this lineage together, accurately and with dignity, has never been more urgent or more possible.

This Journal will be where we share that work: histories we uncover, milestones we reach, and stories from the families whose lives make up this record. We are glad you are here at the beginning.