Barbados Archives Fire Tragedy Reveals Failure to Protect Cultural Heritage

The charred remains of a significant part of the Barbados Archives are a searing indictment of a lack of preparedness for disaster. The tragedy of a fire that erased an unfathomable treasure of what this administration likes to term our ‘intangible cultural heritage’ rightly invites floods of tears; but through the sadness, there must be appreciable and understandable rage at an utter collective failure to protect our nation’s precious cultural legacy.

When the smoke clears from the catastrophic inferno that engulfed this repository of our collective memory, we will be left to confront the harsh reality that years of empty rhetoric about safeguarding our intangible heritage have amounted to nothing but broken promises.

For too long, our leaders have paid lip service to the importance of protecting our cultural treasures, waxing poetic about the need to shield our historical records and artefacts from the ravages of time and inattention. Yet their impassioned speeches ring hollow in the face of this latest tragedy, which has irreparably erased priceless pieces of our island’s story.

How can a government claim to value our roots when it allows the very institutions entrusted with preserving them to operate on little more than a wing and a prayer? Waiting to turn the sod on a new building blinded the government to the need to withstand a host of hazards now. Talk about a fire suppression system was nothing more – talk – leaving irreplaceable documents vulnerable to destruction by fire or other calamities.

Just last month, a delegation from Liberia visited our shores, seeking to reconnect with the country that played a pivotal role in their nation’s founding. The Barbados Archives was a crucial stop on their pilgrimage, housing records that shed light on the lives of the Barbadian emigrants who journeyed to Liberia in 1865, including the influential Barclay family.

The full extent of the loss is unknown, but we fear that key primary sources on Barbados’ role in the slave trade are likely lost. A crucial document in this regard is the 1661 Barbados Slave Code, the first comprehensive slave legislation enacted by Britain’s colonies. Defining enslaved Africans as racial chattel property without rights, this draconian code sanctioned brutal punishments and stripped them of all legal protections. It served as a model for slave codes in other British colonies like Jamaica and the Carolinas, establishing the brutal legal precedent regulating the inhumane treatment of enslaved Africans across Britain’s slave societies in the Americas.

The fire surely jeopardises national and regional efforts to seek reparations from Britain over the cruelties of slavery by erasing vital records and evidence. More broadly, it represents a major setback in preserving Barbados’ cultural identity by erasing irreplaceable pieces of its complex history that educated future generations and connected them to ancestral struggles.

But this injustice against our history did not begin with the flames that licked away at centuries of records. It is merely the latest insult in a long line of atrocities that have seen our cultural patrimony disregarded and squandered. And it goes beyond the papers of our vestry system, the court of chancery and hospital records forever lost to future historians.

It is ironic that the Archives building, the former leper colony known as the Lazaretto, was also the original home of Radio Barbados, now the 60-year-old CBC. The unexplained disappearance and likely destruction of a vast storehouse of critical audio archives of our national broadcaster is a gaping wound that has left our oral histories silenced and invaluable voices of the past muted. Indeed, phonograph records of both our oldest radio stations, public and private, have been inexplicably dumped, not even donated. There was no dramatic fire to bring inescapable attention to these cultural atrocities; just the sneaking away of 90 years of the soundtrack of Barbados to the landfill.

Each of these transgressions represents more than just the loss of paper and tape. They are an erasure of the struggle, resilience, and identity that have defined us as a people. Without these primary sources, our pursuit of reparations and recognition for the atrocities of slavery is crippled. Our children are being robbed of the opportunity to truly understand the extraordinary journey that led us to who and where we are.

So we can no longer accept official sloth and froth while the threads connecting our present to our past are systematically severed through indifference and inaction. Nothing short of a public inquiry should demand accountability from those who have failed to uphold their most sacred duty: to honour and amplify the stories that made us who we are.

A comprehensive but transparent investigation into the archives fire must be launched immediately. The administration promised a concrete, well-funded national strategy to digitise, reinforce, and fortify our remaining cultural institutions against future threats at the start of its first term in 2018. There must be a public running tab on what has been saved by the digitisation process and what has been lost. Or will emotional responses be all we receive?

Successive governments have sought to get away with hollow promissory notes about preserving our heritage. The smouldering ashes of our national archives and failed policies serve as a searing wake-up call that words are empty without decisive, concurrent action to match them. The government needs to go beyond the drawing board to elevate the identities, narratives, and truths that reside in our records, writings, and oral histories.

For too long, our cultural memory has been trampled underfoot and left to gather dust. Now it is reduced to ashes by officials who clearly felt that they had tomorrow put down, as Barbadians say. Now, we must raise our voices in a unified outcry against this derelict of duty to both yesterday. Our histories are our most cherished inheritance, and we must defend them from fading into oblivion with every resource at our disposal. To do any less would be to surrender the very soul of who we are as a people and nation.