Caribbean L 26 ife, Sept. 27 - Oct.3, 2019
Barbados Prime Minister, Mia Mottley addressing Bajan New Yorkers Sunday.
Mia Amor Mottley Facebook
Barbados heading
back to Africa
By George Alleyne
Barbados is changing direction for
foreign trade and cooperation from the
traditional north American and Europe
to the African continent, some middle
eastern states and China.
The thrust into Africa is seen as a
reversal of the Middle Passage of the
triangular slave trade that saw millions
of Africans some 400 years ago captured
and shipped across to the Atlantic to
the Caribbean to become slaves whose
descendants now represent the majority
population of the region.
“We are going to claim our Atlantic
destiny,” Barbados Prime Minister Mia
Mottley told the New York Barbadian
diaspora last Sunday, adding that adopting
an easterly outlook, “does not in any
way compromise our Caribbean-ness.”
Mottley made the declaration as she
and a few of her Cabinet ministers met
New York Bajans in the Leon M. Goldstein
Performance Center at Kingsborough
Community College, where the
diaspora was updated on government
policies and changes.
Describing Bajan New Yorkers as the
island’s 31st constituency in addition
to the 30 that make up Barbados’ parliament,
Mottley bemoaned the fact of
her country’s singular focus on North
America and Europe since it attained
independence in 1966.
The Barbados new thrust is consistent
with what appears as a Caribbean
movement, and presidents of Ghana and
Kenya have visited the region earlier
this year.
She indicated too that during the
Barbados leg of a Caribbean visit by
Kenya’s President, Uhuru Kenyatta, she
undertook to arrange a CARICOM-Africa
summit next year to coincide with the
Commonwealth Heads of Government
meeting in Kigali, Rwanda, in June next
year.
“The time has come for us to make
sure that the bridges and the dollars and
the science and the conversation and
everything to doesn’t only go north but
it can go east and come back west to us,”
she said.
One of the ministers accompanying
Mottley was, Jerome Walcott, who holds
the portfolio for Foreign Affairs.
He spoke of Barbados since independence
in 1966 having a blinkered view in
foreign relations and trade with a strictly
northern outlook. “we stuck slavishly to
relations with North America, United
Kingdom, with Europe.”
Explaining the new direction, he said,
“having left Africa 400 years ago we
thought that it was time that we needed
to look, retrace that Atlantic journey.”
He said that mindful of the region’s
history of persons being brought from
the west coast of Africa primarily across
to the Caribbean and North America,
Barbados believes “it was time that we
recognising the growth of African countries
that it was time for us to make that
transition to go back to the African coast
again.”
“We thought that it was very important
that we establish relations with
Africa, recognising that Africa has 54
countries and that the average growth
rate of African economies is about six
per cent; recognising that African has
almost 500 billionaires, and we’ve been
avoiding this massive continent for several
years.”
He said Barbados will establish a diplomatic
mission in Ghana later this year
and a commercial mission in Casablanca,
Morocco, also in 2019 or early 2020.