SAVE THE DATE

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.