In the eastern Caribbean island of Barbuda, life is about preserving land and maintaining a close, ecologically-sound community.
Codrington Village sits adjacent to the Codrington Lagoon in Barbuda. In the aftermath of Hurricane Irma in September 2017, the Antigua and Barbuda government repealed the Barbuda Land Act, changing the definition of who is Barbudan, stripping Barbudans of communal land rights, and paving the way for major development.
Photograph by Mikki K. Harris By Mikki K. Harris August 11, 2021 • 20 min readI’ve had a relationship with water since before I was born.
As a young child at a barrier island off the coast of southern New Jersey, my father threw me into the cold open waters of the Atlantic, an exercise for me to find my bearings inside the waves. Watching intently, cautiously, he repeated the words that Papa, my grandfather, spoke to him: The ocean is like anything in life; Learn it’s rhythm and you’ll not only flow with it, you won’t have to work so hard to enjoy it.
My father is a sixth-generation descendant of Barbudan people. I am a seventh.
The skill of navigation, the art of catching fish, understanding the meaning of the temperature and color of the water, and so much more has been passed down to me and others through our people. And being connected to this independent, self-governing Black community, having been immersed in this culture, has been central to my identity as an African of the Americas.
It’s not surprising if you’ve not heard of Barbuda: this small, 62 square-mile island in the eastern Caribbean is the less known half of a twin island State that, along with Antigua, gained independence from England in 1981
Barbudans have kept mostly to themselves, concerned less with growing tourism than with working to preserve their land and maintain a tight-knit, ecologically-sound community of about 1,500 people.
My grandparents were born and raised in the very same village as my great-great-great-great-great grandparents. Like my father before me, I learned about my connection to the earth and her seas at the Codrington Lagoon, the wetlands that serve as the center of community life and entrepôt for our fisheries.
Barbudans are descended from West Africa and Africans of the British Isles, with many—like my family—tracing lineage back nine generations. We are fishers, navigators, farmers and artisans with a way of life that has remained largely unchanged for more than three centuries.
Long before the British set foot on Barbudan shores, the land was known by the Caribs, Siboney and Arawak Nations as Wa’Omoni. The presence of First Nations peoples can still be found in Barbuda today through genetics and a drawing on the interior wall of “Indian Cave” on the northeast end of the island. The British Crown claimed the island in 1685, after which Scottish brothers Christopher and John Codrington were granted an initial lease to the island by King Charles of Great Britain. This lease would later be extended by Queen Anne once she was private owner of the island. Christopher managed his sister’s plantation, Betty’s Hope, 63 kilometers away on Antigua, and had a plantation in Barbados, but was not able to create a similar plantation on Barbuda because the terrain was not conducive.
The Codringtons looked to the British Isles to import skilled laborers and indentured servants. Those who arrived on Barbuda via the main Port on Antigua were skilled as hoopers, coopers, ship wrights, metal workers, and sail makers. A number of freed Blacks who lived in Europe were drawn to the offer because in addition to wages commensurate to their level of skill, a plot of land for a domicile, a plot of land for provisions—known as “grung” even today—and supplementary rations were also offered. These laborers—plus a handful of indentured whites—were the first Barbudans. The white indentured servants departed once their debts were paid, but the Black laborers from the British Isles and later West Africa, remained, and their ancestry is connected to Barbudans today.
Barbudans are an extension of the land. It’s difficult to fully express through the written word, or even in photographs. The land in many respects is us. In a letter from June 1, 1834, Christopher Codrington described Barbudans as “one united family so attached to Barbuda that force alone or extreme drought…can alone take them from that island!”
Throughout the world, communal well-being has long been a feature of free Black communities, especially those that grew from resistance to the international slave trade. Jessica Gordon Nembhard, author of Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice, notes that every human population in every era of human history has used and uses mutual aid, economic solidarity and cooperation to survive and thrive. She found that African Americans, like other subaltern peoples, used multiple forms of economic cooperation and collective ownership to resist enslavement and free themselves, to feed their families, to maintain land ownership, to secure affordable housing and non-predatory lending, to create decent jobs, and to keep resources recirculating in their communities.
