Submitted buy The Inked Blade
OPINION | LAND, CLASS & EQUITY IN BARBADOS
In the lush hills of St. John, the land is speaking … but it’s not speaking to the average Barbadian.
Instead, it whispers through full-page advertisements in national newspapers, calling for bidders to lease plantations like Todds, Wakefield, Clifton Hall, and Hothersal, prime agricultural properties once tied to Barbados’ colonial economy, now available to the highest bidder under terms that effectively exclude the very people most in need of opportunity.
A recent ad published in the Nation (July 9, 2025) lists multiple plantations for lease in St.John, one of the island’s most fertile and underdeveloped parishes. But there’s a catch: no listed price, no public lease terms, no criteria for inclusion-just the fine print that interested parties must submit sealed proposals with financial offers.
Let’s call this what it is: a quiet auction for the privileged. A modern-day plantation rebranding that pretends to be about opportunity but is, in practice, a coded gatekeeping mechanism.
Who gets to bid? Who can offer up-front investment at scale, propose full agro-tourism or commercial developments, and sit at the table with government agencies and trust boards? Not the average Barbadian farmer. Not the Black cooperative. Not the smallholder with a vision but no connections.
Plantations for Lease, But Not for Us
We have seen this before. Whether at Society Plantation, still overgrown, crawling with cow itch, a haven for rodents and criminal elements, right next door to a secondary school that could benefit immensely from agricultural training and community-based learning. Instead, the site sits abandoned, its overgrowth symbolic of everything wrong with land governance in Barbados.
And what of the recently concluded We Gathering in St. John? What pride can we claim when the very lands tied to our history and survival remain an embarrassment; overrun and unmanaged? What message do we send to the next generation looking across the road at a rotting legacy?
As the Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite once wrote:
“The sun’s going down /on the same canefield/ same silence.” That silence now feels like complicity.
George Lamming said: “The architecture of colonialism was not just physical but mental.” And this architecture remains intact when access is denied, opportunity is auctioned, and development is dictated by wealth.
The Urban Enclosure: Pierhead and the Disappearance of the Public
In Bridgetown, the Pierhead Marina development stands as another testament to exclusion. Promoted as a symbol of national renewal, it has instead become a fortress for the elite.
What was meant to be an open waterfront, accessible to all Barbadians, is now dominated by private yachts, elite condos, and concrete walls. The boardwalk, once envisioned as a cultural artery, has become a gated abstraction.
Where are the public markets? The youth centers? The promised integration of heritage and modernity. Instead, access is cutoff, and the public is left to peer through fences at what was once theirs.
And to add insult to injury, the very companies executing these elite projects are often owned or heavily influenced by the descendants of the same plantation class that benefited from Barbados’ slave economy. Their names persist on contracts, on building sites, on policy boards ensuring that the nation continues to be built by and for the few.
What of the Poor? Forgotten, Again
The HOPE Project promised housing and empowerment. It delivered scandal and neglect.
Funding meant to transform communities vanished into consultancy fees and administrative limbo. Empty lots and unfinished home now dot our landscape, monuments to bureaucratic failure and broken promises.
Meanwhile, the average Barbadian continues to dream of land, home, and legacy but is denied by a system that elevates connections over community.
A Nation at the Crossroads
This isn’t just about leases or developments, it’s about who we are, and who we want to be. The systemic exclusion of Black, working-class Barbadians from land, ownership, and opportunity is not an accident-it is a legacy perpetuated by silence and policy.
James Baldwin said it plainly:
“Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.” In Barbados, it is also expensive to dream.
The Invisible Hand Still Holds the Pen
What is perhaps most insidious is that the decision-making power around these lands and developments remains entrenched in the hands of a modern- day gentry. Many of the boards tasked with oversight and public trust today are quietly composed of individuals from Barbados’ historic plantocracy, current plutocracy of the powerful and elite circles. Caucasian and most recent Indian ethnicities, have been able to use their connections and influence to steer policies toward their friends, families, and business associates.
The average Black Barbadian, no matter how educated, experienced, or financially prepared, is too often kept at the gate, not for lack of merit, but for lack of lineage. These decisions are not just administrative, they are generationally damaging. Every bypassed opportunity, every sealed bid out of reach, every denied lease is another door closed on Barbados’ future.
The result is a country eating itself from the inside. We distract ourselves by fighting on call-in programmes, defending political parties with allegiances so blind they border on worship. All the while, the true levers of control are quietly being pulled, deals made, and shifted, and futures decided without public voice or vote.
“The future will have no pity for those men who, possessing the exceptional privilege of being able to speak the words of truth…have taken refuge in an attitude of passivity, of mute indifference, and sometimes of cold complicity. Frantz Fanon
We must not remain mute. We must not let indifference become our inheritance.
Reclaiming the Nation from the Few
We must act now. We must:
1. Demand public land lease pricing transparency, with published terms, eligibility, and community consultation.
2. Mandate that a portion of all government-leased or managed land be reserved for youth, women, and grassroots cooperatives, with staggered lease payments.
3. Establish a People’s Land Trust for smallholders, farmers, and eco-entrepreneurs to access land based on merit, not money.
4. Ensure that all major urban developments like Pierhead include public access guarantees, housing equity, and cultural preservation.
A Call to Conscience
Barbados is not just a brand or a beachfront—it is a birthright. And birthrights should not be auctioned.
If we continue to allow land—our most sacred resource—to be divided along class lines, we will become what our ancestors feared most: a free nation built on fenced freedom.
Let the land speak again. But let it speak to all of us.
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