Rebel Sounds: Musical Resistance in Barbados

The Radio 3 Documentary

From 1627-1807, nearly 400,000 human beings were kidnapped, sold and shipped in horrific conditions across the Atlantic Ocean from West Africa to the tiny island of Barbados. There, they were enslaved by British landowners and forced to work the sugar plantations that covered the island. Uprooted from their homelands, separated from their families and denied their humanity, they nevertheless managed to hold on to aspects of the culture that formed them - and to pass them on through generations of their enslaved descendants.

Opera singer Peter Brathwaite is fascinated with his Barbadian heritage and ancestry. It's a complicated story; he's descended from both black enslaved people and their enslaving white plantation owners. In this programme Peter travels to Barbados to discover the music made by enslaved people - the cultural glue that bound them to Africa - and the attempts made by the British enslavers to deny, deride or override this music. From plantation dances to Christian hymns and the discovery of some remarkable pro-enslavement propaganda songs, Peter talks to Barbadian historians and musicians to build up a picture of what the enslaved people's musical lives might have been.

Visiting significant sites on the island, catching up with relatives, and drawing on his own significant research, Peter also uncovers the story of his great, great, great, great grandparents Addo and Margaret, both of whom began their lives in Barbados enslaved but who were eventually freed by the white Brathwaites who 'owned' them. Their lives offer a window into the layered social hierarchies that developed on the island in the early years of the 19th Century, as the rising abolitionist movement in Britain gave birth to a new chapter in Barbados's complicated history.

Recorded on location on the beautiful island of Barbados, this programme examines the cultural and social legacy of enslavement, which continues to shape the nation of Barbados, and the identity of its people, today.