Barbados's culture: plantation forms turned to new uses

What Barbadians speak at home and write at work

English is the official language, used in government, the courts, print and business, in a standard close to British English. Most people speak something else in daily life. Bajan, an English-based creole with West and Central African and British influences, is by the Wikipedia account the language of everyday conversation, music and social commentary, and Ethnologue counted about 260,000 native Bajan speakers against about 30,000 native speakers of English in 2018. Britannica calls it a nonstandard English.

Bajan is fully rhotic, sounding the r in words like start, and tends to turn a final t into a glottal stop, which sets it apart from neighbouring creoles. It marks tense with helper verbs rather than endings: "I does guh church pun a Sunduh" for a habit, "He walk town" for the past. The second-person plural pronoun is wunna. It has no standardised spelling, and new words enter it through the social commentary sung at Crop Over each year.

Its history is contested among linguists. One account has it growing from the English that enslaved West Africans were forced to learn; another looks to contact with other creoles. Few African-born captives arrived after 1800, which the Wikipedia account links to how early the population became Bajan-speaking, and emigrants carried the speech to Carolina, where it influenced Gullah. The word Bajan itself came from Badian, a 19th-century shortening of Barbadian. The island's nickname, Bim, is traced by the National Cultural Foundation to an Igbo word meaning my home or kindred.

How the landship turned naval drill into mutual aid

The landship is a Barbadian institution with no close equivalent elsewhere. Crews name their ships after British men-of-war and public figures, hold ranks from captain to Lord High Admiral, call their headquarters the dock and perform drills that mimic life at sea: cleaning the decks, stoking the fire, hauling the anchor. Oral tradition names a seaman, Moses Wood, as founder in 1863, and in 2013 the government marked the 150th anniversary at the Independence Day parade on the Garrison Savannah.

An article in the International Journal of Intangible Heritage sets out what the naval dress covered. The historian Aviston Downes describes the landship as one of the friendly societies the Black working class set up in the late 19th century, independent of the churches; Hilary Beckles describes associations whose members were ranked by the Navy's own hierarchy. Members paid weekly dues into a pooled fund, the susu, from a Yoruba word, to cover illness, death and unemployment and to pay a Christmas bonus. At a time when wages averaged sixpence a day, that was a safety net. By the 1920s there were three fleets of more than 60 ships, with about 3,000 men and 800 women. Marcia Burrowes reads the drills as masquerade, combining the straight lines of a Western parade with West African circular movement, and not as imitation.

Landships declined in the mid-20th century, revived in the 1970s under the Barbados Landship Association, and since the 1990s have merged into a single ship.

How tuk and spouge carry the island's rhythms

The landship's engine is the tuk band: a double-headed bass drum, a smaller kittle drum and a penny whistle or flute, sometimes with a triangle. Visit Barbados, the national tourism body, describes tuk as a response to the banning of African drums, military instruments played to African rhythms, and the bands still parade with costumed characters such as Mother Sally, a masked man dressed as a woman, said to stand for the fertility of the ancestors. A study by Best from 2012, quoted in the landship article, calls tuk the most significant indigenous rhythm of Barbados.

Spouge was the island's music of the 1960s, developed by the singer Jackie Opel, who fused early Jamaican dancehall with Trinidadian calypso, and it survives on AM radio on Sundays. Calypso and soca belong to Crop Over, where calypso's job is commentary on Barbadian life and politics, judged in the Pic-O-De-Crop competition. A jazz festival is held each January and a reggae festival, begun in 2005, each spring.

How Crop Over came back from the plantations

Crop Over marked the end of the cane harvest. The Wikipedia article on Barbados dates its establishment to 1687. The most productive male and female cane cutters were crowned King and Queen of the crop, a title now contested in elaborate costumes. On what happened next the sources disagree. Britannica writes that the harvest celebrations died out in the mid-20th century. The National Cultural Foundation, citing research by Marcia Burrowes at the University of the West Indies and its own oral-history project, says they dwindled after the Second World War as plantations closed but that they never died out entirely.

The modern festival began as a tourism decision. The Jaycees ran a Trinidad-style carnival at Kensington Oval from 1958 to 1964, and it did not catch on. In the 1970s the Board of Tourism wanted more visitors in summer, and its public relations officer, Julian Marryshaw, set up a Crop Over committee, drawing, by the foundation's account, on research into plantation Crop Over by the cultural activist Elombe Mottley. Early events were criticised as elitist. The decorated cart parade, introduced in 1974, was the exception that drew crowds in their thousands. The National Cultural Foundation has run the festival since 1983.

The festival has kept adding parts. Soca Monarch joined the older Pic-O-De-Crop calypso contest; Foreday Morning, a pre-dawn procession of mud, powder and paint, is a recent addition; Junior Kadooment gives children their own parade. The foundation's heritage strand has staged an Evening of Folk since 2012 in commemoration of the labour riots of 1937, and it describes the whole season, which now runs over about three months, as generating millions for the national economy.

The calendar has smaller fixtures too: Gospelfest, a Christian music festival; De Congaline Carnival from 23 April; and the Mount Gay regatta each January. The Holetown Festival is the one that looks back to settlement, beginning on 17 February, the anniversary of the landing of 1627.

What a Barbadian table is built on

The national dish is cou-cou and flying fish. Cou-cou is a thick cornmeal, cooked like polenta, served with fish stewed in gravy, and the chef Jason Howard, writing for Great British Chefs, sets it beside Bajan chopped seasoning, a wet paste of onion, garlic, ginger, thyme, lime and scotch bonnet chilli. Pudding and souse, pickled pork served with a steamed sweet-potato pudding, is eaten on Saturdays. Fish cakes, macaroni pie, black pudding, tamarind balls and baked custard are common, and the staples are sweet potato, yam, breadfruit, cassava and rice.

The sea supplies much of it: kingfish, swordfish, red snapper, tuna, marlin and the mahi-mahi locally called dolphin. Street food gathers at Baxter's Road near Bridgetown and at Oistins, whose Friday night fish fry is a fixture. Mount Gay traces its rum to a deed of 1703, and Banks brews beer at its brewery on the island.

Why cricket belongs to Kensington Oval

Britannica calls cricket the national sport. The first team was formed in 1877 for white players only, and teams of all races followed. Garfield Sobers and Frank Worrell are the players the island names first, and Barbadians have regularly filled places in the West Indies side. Kensington Oval in Bridgetown, whose history the ground's own management traces to 1871, staged its first international match in 1895 and its first Test in January 1930. It was rebuilt for the 2007 Cricket World Cup and hosted that final, and Barbados hosted the final of the men's T20 World Cup in 2024.

Road tennis, played on quiet streets with wooden paddles and a tennis ball stripped of its fuzz, is believed to have been invented on the island. Barbados first sent athletes to the Olympics in 1952 and first competed as an independent country in 1968, and the sprinter Obadele Thompson won a bronze medal in the 100 metres in 2000. Surf and wind shape the rest of the sporting calendar: the Barbados Surf Pro is held at Bathsheba on the Atlantic coast each March, and the trade winds make the southern tip a site for wave sailing. The national football team, the Bajan Tridents, is named after the trident on the flag.

Who makes up the Barbadian population

Britannica counts people of African and mixed African and European descent as more than nine-tenths of the population, with small minorities of European, South Asian, Syrian, Lebanese and Chinese origin and an expatriate community of retirees, business people and international civil servants from the United States and Britain. The Wikipedia account puts Euro-Bajans at about 5%. Among them are the Redlegs, a poor white community descended from Irish indentured labourers and from followers of the Duke of Monmouth transported after Sedgemoor, now about 400 people. A community from India and Guyana has grown since around 1990, many of its Muslim members of Gujarati descent and running small businesses. Barbadians who return after years in the United States are called Bajan Yankees, a name some find derogatory.

Schooling follows the British model and is compulsory to 16. Free education for all was one of the reforms of Errol Barrow's government in the 1960s, and higher education is provided by the Barbados Community College, the Samuel Jackman Prescod Institute of Technology, Codrington College and the Cave Hill campus of the University of the West Indies. Rastafarians form a small community and have complained of discrimination in schooling and employment.

How faith and heritage are counted

The Church of England was the state church until Parliament disestablished it after independence. By the Wikipedia count for 2019, Anglicans made up 23.9% of the population, Pentecostals 19.5% and those with no religion 21%; the 2021 census, taken from 2 August that year, recorded 45.5% with no religious affiliation at all. The two figures measure different things in different years and are given here side by side. Britannica lists Methodists, Moravians, Seventh-day Adventists, Roman Catholics, Jews, Hindus and Muslims among the smaller communities. The Nidhe Israel Synagogue in Bridgetown dates from 1654; the present building went up in 1833 after the hurricane of 1831.

Most historic building on the island is Jacobean, Georgian or Victorian in style, in wood, stone and coral stone, much of it built by enslaved workers. Chattel houses, small wooden houses set on blocks so they could be moved from one rented plot to another, are the vernacular form, and the Wikipedia culture article links their bright paintwork to West African influence. Cultural institutions cluster in Bridgetown: the Barbados Museum, founded in 1933, the national art collection and the Department of Archives. The writers George Lamming and Kamau Brathwaite are Barbadian. In 1998 Parliament named the island's National Heroes, among them Bussa and Clement Payne, and the singer Rihanna was added on 30 November 2021, the day the republic began.