05/07/2020
THROWBACK THURSDAY: Picture of a man who was born into slavery, taken around late 1800s at Codrington College. Though his name was not recorded for the photograph, he was in effect one of the last Barbadian slaves alive at the time. After being freed, he still lived on the plantation and worked a plot of land for subsistence and to sell, as was customary at the time in Barbados after slavery finished. With nowhere to go in the island, high land prices, lowest wages in the Caribbean, an excessive labour force used to keep labour costs down and the plantocracy blocking emigration and any attempts at higher education, many freed people were now forced to still live and work on the plantations still as the planter elite wanted a captive labour force and feared a mass exodus in the post-Emancipation period. Aside from its Christian mission, Codrington College was also a plantation and an institution that utilized slave labour with no qualms, even going as far as branding slaves with the word ‘Society’ to indicate they were property of the College, a practice stopped after 1741 after the slaves complained about it and marched to Bridgetown to demand proper treatment from the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG), who oversaw Codrington College’s affairs. The SPG belonged to the Church of England so in effect the slaves at Codrington College and the plantation lands all belonged to the Church of England, who owned and oversaw all the affairs of the plantation. It was only after 1790 and the anti-slavery movement in London that the College was forced to offer better living and working conditions for its slaves and The College only released the slaves when it was forced to in 1834 by the act of Emancipation. The entirety of Codrington College as it stands today was built many times over using slave labour.
