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The flag of Barbados: Three equal vertical bands of blue (hoist side), gold, and blue with the head of a black trident centered on the gold band; the trident head represents independence and a break with the past (the colonial coat of arms contained a complete trident).
The national flag of Barbados was officially adopted on November 30, 1966, the island's first Independence Day. It consists of a triband of two bands of ultramarine separated by a golden middle band. A black trident head is centred within the golden band.
The trident head - also known as the 'broken trident' - symbolizes Barbados' independence from the United Kingdom (the colonial coat of arms contained a complete trident), and each point represents a point of democracy. The ultramarine bands symbolize the ocean and the sky, and the golden band symbolizes the sand of Barbados.
Barbados is an independent island nation located in the western Atlantic Ocean, just to the east of the Caribbean Sea, found at roughly 13° north of the Equator and 59° west of the Prime Meridian. Located relatively close to South America the nation of Barbados is around 434.5 kilometres (270 miles) northeast of the South American nation of Venezuela.
The closest island neighbours to Barbados are Saint Lucia and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines both located to the west Trinidad and Tobago to the south and Grenada to the south-west. Barbados is part of Lesser Antilles.
Barbados possesses a land area of around 430 square kilometres, (166 sq. mi), and is primarily low-lying, with some higher regions in the island's interior. The organic composition of Barbados is thought to be of non-volcanic origin and is predominantly composed of limestone-coral. The island's atmosphere is sub-tropical with constant trade winds off the Atlantic Ocean and some undeveloped areas contain marshes and mangrove swamps. Other parts of the island's interior contributing the island's agricultural sector are dotted with large sugarcane estates and wide gently sloping pastures with many good views down to the sea.
Barbados has one of the highest standards of living and literacy rates in the developing world and, according to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Barbados is currently the No. 4 most developed of all developing countries in the world. Despite its small geographical size, Barbados constantly ranks in the top 30 (or 31) countries in the HDI (Human Development Index) rankings. The island is also a major tourist destination.
Barbados has a population of about 279,000 and a growth rate of 0.33% (Mid-2005 estimates). Close to 90 percent of all Barbadians (also known colloquially as Bajan) are of African descent ("Afro-Bajans"), mostly descendants of the slave labourers on the sugar plantations. The remainder of the population includes groups of Europeans ("Anglo-Bajans" / "Euro-Bajans"), Chinese locally known as Bajan-Chiney, Bajan Hindus and Muslims, and an influential Middle Eastern ("Arab-Bajans") group mainly of Syrian and Lebanese descent.
Other groups in Barbados include people from the United States, Canada, United Kingdom and expatriates from Latin America. Barbadians who return after years of residence in the U.S. are called "Bajan Yankees"; this term is considered derogatory by some.
The country's official language is English, the local dialect of which is referred to as Bajan. While most Barbadians are Protestant Christians (67%), chiefly of the Anglican Church, there are other Protestant, Roman Catholic, Hindu and Muslim minorities. Barbados is currently a chief emigration location from the South American nation of Guyana.
The earliest inhabitants of Barbados were Amerindian nomads. Three waves of migrants moved north toward North America. The first wave was of the Saladoid-Barrancoid group, who were farmers, fishermen, and ceramists that arrived by canoe from South America (Venezuela's Orinoco Valley) around 350 CE. The Arawak people were the second wave of migrants, arriving from South America around 800 CE. Arawak settlements on the island include Stroud Point, Chandler Bay, Saint Luke's Gully, and Mapp's Cave. According to accounts by descendants of the aboriginal Arawak tribes on other local islands, the original name for Barbados was Ichirouganaim. In the 13th century, the Caribs arrived from South America in the third wave, displacing both the Arawak and the Salodoid-Barrancoid. For the next few centuries, the Caribs—like the Arawak and the Salodoid-Barrancoid—lived in isolation on the island.
The name "Barbados" comes from a Portuguese explorer named Pedro Campos in 1536, who originally called the island Os Barbados ("The Bearded Ones") upon seeing the appearance of the island's fig trees whose long hanging aerial roots, he thought, resembled beards. Between Campos' sighting in 1536 and 1550, Spanish conquistadors seized many Caribs on Barbados and used them as slave labour on plantations. Other Caribs fled the island, moving elsewhere.
British sailors who landed on Barbados in the 1620s at the site of present-day Holetown on the Caribbean coast found the island uninhabited. From the arrival of the first British settlers in 1627–1628 until independence in 1966, Barbados was under uninterrupted British control. Nevertheless, Barbados always enjoyed a large measure of local autonomy. Its House of Assembly began meeting in 1639. Among the initial important British figures was Sir William Courten.
Starting in the 1620s an increasing number of black slaves were brought to the isle. 5000 locals died of fever in 1647, and hundreds of slaves were executed by Royalist planters during the English Civil War in the 1640s, as they feared that the ideas of the Levellers might spread to the slave population if Parliament took control of Barbados.
Large numbers of Celtic people, mainly from Ireland and Scotland, went to Barbados as indentured servants. Over the next several centuries the Celtic population was used as a buffer between the Anglo-Saxon plantation owners and the larger African population, variously serving as members of the Colonial militia and playing a strong role as allies of the larger African slave population in a long string of colonial rebellions. As well, in 1659, the English shipped many Irishmen and Scots off to Barbados as slaves. With King James II, and other kings in his dynasty, also sending Scots, and English, off to the isle. For instance in 1685, after the crushing of the Monmouth Rebellion. The modern descendants of this original slave population are sometimes derisively referred to as Red Legs, or locally 'ecky becky' and are some of the poorest inhabitants of modern Barbados. There has also been large scale intermarriage between the African and Celtic populations on the islands. Because the Africans could withstand tropical diseases and the climate much better than the white slave population, and also because those poor whites who had or acquired the means to emigrate often did so, Barbados turned from mainly Celtic in the 17th century to overwhelmingly black by the 20th century.
As the sugar industry developed into the main commercial enterprise, Barbados was divided into large plantation estates that replaced the small holdings of the early British settlers. Some of the displaced farmers relocated to British colonies in North America, most notably South Carolina. To work the plantations, West Africans were transported and enslaved on Barbados and other Caribbean islands. The slave trade ceased in 1804. Slaves though carried on being oppressed, causing, in 1816, the major slave rebellion, in the isle's history. One thousand people died in the revolt for freedom, with 144 slaves executed, and 123 deported, by the king's army. Eighteen years later slavery was abolished in the British Empire in 1834. In Barbados and the rest of the British West Indian colonies, full emancipation from slavery was preceded by an apprenticeship period that lasted six years.
However, plantation owners and merchants of British descent still dominated local politics, due to the high income qualification required for voters. More than 70% of the population, many of them disenfranchised women, were excluded from the democratic process. It was not until the 1930s that the descendants of emancipated slaves began a movement for political rights. One of the leaders of this movement, Sir Grantley Adams, founded the Barbados Labour Party, then known as the Barbados Progressive League, in 1938. Though a staunch supporter of the monarchy, Adams and his party demanded more for the poor and for the people. Progress toward a more democratic government in Barbados was made in 1942, when the exclusive income qualification was lowered and women were given the right to vote. By 1949 governmental control was wrestled from the planters and, in 1958, Adams became Premier of Barbados.
From 1958 to 1962, Barbados was one of the ten members of the West Indies Federation, an organisation doomed by nationalistic attitude and by the fact that its members, as colonies of Britain, held limited legislative power. Adams' leadership of the Federation (he served as its first and only "Prime Minister"), his failed attempts to form similar unions, and his continued defence of the monarchy demonstrated that he was no longer in touch with the needs of his country. Errol Walton Barrow, a fervent reformer, was to become the new people's advocate. Barrow had left the BLP and formed the Democratic Labour Party as a liberal alternative to Adams' conservative government. To this day, Barrow remains a beloved hero in the eyes of Barbadians, as it was he who instituted many of the reforms and programs currently in place, including free education for all Barbadians, regardless of class or colour, and the School Meals system. By 1961, Barrow had replaced Adams as Premier and the DLP controlled the government.
With the Federation dissolved, Barbados had reverted to its former status, that of a self-governing colony. The island negotiated its own independence at a constitutional conference with the United Kingdom in June 1966. After years of peaceful and democratic progress, Barbados finally became an independent state within the Commonwealth of Nations on November 30, 1966, with Errol Barrow serving as its first Prime Minister.
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