The Voyage of the Love and Friendship Slave Ship

Barbados, where the Love and Friendship slaves were sold

Slavery still looms large over Barbados, as it was so key to its economy for so long. As Laurent Dubois, a professor at Duke wrote in The New York Times:

“What today is a university was once a plantation. What is now a nation was once a colony. In Barbados and throughout the Caribbean, slavery remains a vivid and potent metaphor, and a cultivated memory.”

She also noted that slavery left a profound economic toll in Barbados, like its did in many other Caribbean nations, as centuries of economic exploitation left them weak.

“This is more than just creative accounting,” she said. “When economists debate why some countries are poor and others are rich, they often focus on the cultural, political or economic structures of poor countries. But historians of the Caribbean have long argued that national inequality is a direct result of centuries of economic exploitation.”

The World Bank ranks Barbados as having the 159th GDP in the world, which is considered poor.

In Barbados, slavery remains a painful stain on its past, but it also tells a story of perseverance and determination that is inspiring. They celebrate figure like Bussa, who led the largest slave rebellions in the country in 1816, and served as a catalyst that would eventually end slavery in all British-ruled territories, even though Bussa’s initial rebellion was unsuccessful. Barbados was one of the earliest places Britain developed its overseas plantation model, so it was fitting that it would start an insurrection so large that it would cause the beginning of the end of it.

The passengers of the Love and Friendship arrived in Barbados in 1683, so it would be over a hundred of years before they would see hope of freedom. But it’s possible that their descendants, many years later, would have been freed in part because of the work Bussa and other abolitionists did.

Barbados was a country that was built off of plantations and is inextricably linked to colonialism, and because of this, they’ve grappled with post-slavery issues with race much like America has.

The British Library Board posted about this:

“The trans-Atlantic slave system was inherently racist, but the 1833 Abolition of Slavery Act, despite its stated intention, did little to dismantle the structures of racial inequality. Freedom was not immediate. Instead, slavery was replaced by a new system of apprenticeships: a transitional scheme that required hitherto enslaved persons to continue working for their previous owners for 45 hours per week in return for free board and lodging. By any other name they remained enslaved.

“They also remained reliant on a system of law and order that privileged the white settler population. Emancipation coincided with the establishment, in 1834, of the first formal police force in Barbados and one of the first reported interactions between the police and the black community was indicative of the continued inequality.” (Jevon)

The apprenticeship system was not so much different than the system of sharecropping many former slaves in America were forced into that often preserved the power structures of slavery, and Barbados’ racist policing also has similarities to that of America. Today, they deal with similar issues of race, so much so that their response to the killing of George Floyd talked about a lot of the same issues of white privilege and institutional racism. (Phillips)

Madagascar, the origin of the slaves aboard the Love and Friendship

The legacies of slavery in the homeland of the slaves who were forced onto the Love and Friendship are a bit different, as slavery existed in Madagascar as early as the 10th century and was generally accepted there as normal, but it was not a huge commercial export until Europeans established a relationship with it during the 16th and 17th centuries. But a treaty ended the export slave trade in 1820, so it was mostly internal between that time and 1896, when the country was forcefully emancipated by the French, who invaded the country and annexed the colony. It would remain a French colony until 1960.

It’s worth noting that Madagascar’s GDP is 129, according to the World Bank, which is significantly better than Barbados.

Like Ghana in Lose Your Mother, Madagascar wasn’t the site of huge European slave plantations, and as such, slavery was not as crucial to its economy and society as those societies. But it was very ingrained in their culture, and Madagascar served as a source country for those large plantations.

Still, the paper Slavery and post-slavery in Madagascar: an overview, a credible research paper from France, describes prejudices against descendants of slaves that isn’t present in other African slave-supplying countries:

“Another important point to keep in mind is the specificity of the Malagasy islanders’
attitudes towards slavery and slave descendants, in comparison with those present on the African continent. Although a number of similarities and regularities exist, such as the tendency to avoid marrying slave descendants or to silence personal histories of slavery, there are also specific features that, to our knowledge, are hardly found in continental Africa. This seems to be the case of the view, widespread in the island but seemingly absent on the continent, that slaves and their descendants are deeply polluted and polluting persons.”

The paper’s research also found that even after a century after emancipation, slavery was still a sensitive subject in the country, as academic conferences only took place recently, and they were emotionally-charged events. The paper says “even though they were scholars, many Malagasy (natives of Madagascar) found it difficult to talk about these issues.” It also notes that the legacies of slavery in Madagascar are harder to define because of this, as most of the studies on the impacts on slavery have been done in Imerina, which benefitted the most from slavery. The paper says “In comparison to what has already been done for the Merina case, the study of post-slavery in the rest of Madagascar has remained largely overlooked until recently.”

It also notes that after abolition, ex-slaves had three options: “(1) to return back to the areas from which they had been taken (if this was possible); (2) to stay in the villages where they were slaves and to keep working on their former masters’
estates (often on a sharecropping contract); or (3) to find empty land where they could start a new life by building terraces and cultivating rice.”

Those who took the third option formed slave villages, and they were separated from normal Madagascar villages because they saw them as “polluted people.” In some cases, ex-slave villages ended up fairing better than free villages, as ex-slave villages did not have as restrictive marriage rules which let them form bonds with outsiders more easily, though free villages retained power structures and wealth earned from slavery. Still, option #3 seems to be very similar to what was promised to ex-slaves in America, but by letting ex-salves live off of empty land, it helped them get ahead much quicker.

The impacts of slavery are very much alive in Madagascar, as discrimination against the “polluted people” is common and many cities have their societies of slave descendants segregated from everyone else, and they still look down upon marrying descendants of slaves.

Conclusion

The people aboard the Love and Friendship slave ship were taken from Madagascar and sold to plantation owners in Barbados in 1683. While not much is known about the journey, we know of the history of the two lands they belonged to, and in both cases, abolition was a long way away.

Barbados has made great progress since abolition, and has even become its own sovereign nation, but there is plenty of work there to battle institutional racism and to bring wealth to the country. There is a strong case for reparations in Barbados, as for hundreds of years it had its wealth stolen by European countries.

Slavery is more painful in Madagascar, the origin of the ship’s crewmates, as it was abolished slavery very late, and it was not its own decision; France did it for them when they invaded. Madagascar has not benefitted from France’s occupation, and it has had to do a lot of work to re-establish itself as a sovereign nation.

Segregation is alive and well in Madagascar, because people refuse to mix with those descended from slaves.

The history of slavery is very present in both countries, but both countries had different relationships with it, which is why they grapple with it in different ways. Barbados’ legacy with slavery seems to be more similar to where America is now, while Madagascar seems to be where America was decades ago in its segregation.

Works Cited

Denis Regnier, Dominique Somda. Slavery and post-slavery in Madagascar: an overview. 2018. ffhal-01519506v3f

Dubois, Laurent. “Confronting the Legacies of Slavery.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 28 Oct. 2013, www.nytimes.com/2013/10/29/opinion/international/confronting-the-legacies-of-slavery.html.

“GDP Ranking.” GDP Ranking (GDP) | Data Catalog, 20 Aug. 2010, datacatalog.worldbank.org/dataset/gdp-ranking.

Jevon, Graham. “The Legacy of Slavery: A 19th Century Newspaper and 21st Century Racial Inequity.” Endangered Archives Blog, blogs.bl.uk/endangeredarchives/2020/06/the-legacy-of-slavery-a-19th-century-newspaper-and-21st-century-racial-inequity.html.

Phillips, Stacey. “Since George Floyd’s Murder, Black Barbadians Are Becoming More Vocal about Racism · Global Voices.” Global Voices, 21 July 2020, globalvoices.org/2020/07/20/since-george-floyds-murder-black-barbadians-are-becoming-more-openly-vocal-about-racism/.

There are several time periods referenced in my timelines about slavery in Barbados. The English colonized Barbados between 1625-1644, and they established sugar, cotton and tobacco plantations. Most of the workers during this time were white indentured servants. White prisoners were even sent to work the plantations, though black slaves existed. (Barbados.org)

Between 1644-1720, Barbados imported slaves from Sierra Leone, Guinea, Ghana, the Ivory Coast, Nigeria and Cameroon, and they became dominant in sugar production. But a series of natural disasters in the 1660s hurt them, and they were no longer dominant by 1720. (Barbados.org)

There were three major rebellions in the West Indies in the 1800s that led to English Emancipation in 1838, the first of which was the Bussa Rebellion in 1816, that took place in Barbados, led by a slave named Bussa. It was short-lived and was in response to a bill that would require the registration of British colonial slaves, and ended in Marshall law, with most people involved captured and punished. (Momodu)

Slavery ended in Barbados in 1834, but wasn’t celebrated until 1838, because there was a four-year apprenticeship in between in which they’d continue to work on plantations. Apprentices usually get trade skills and experience in exchange for unpaid labor, but the apprenticeship period was not very different from slavery (PortCities Bristol).

Works Cited

Guide, Barbados.org Travel. “★ About Barbados ★.” Go Barbados, barbados.org/history1.htm.

Momodu, Samuel. “BUSSA REBELLION (1816).” Bussa Rebellion (1816), 19 July 2019, www.blackpast.org/global-african-history/bussa-rebellion-1816/.

“PortCities Bristol.” The End of Slavery | Apprenticeship: Slavery by Another Name? | Freedom from Slavery | Against Slavery | Bristol and Transatlantic Slavery | PortCities Bristol, www.discoveringbristol.org.uk/slavery/against-slavery/freedom-from-slavery/apprenticeship/slavery-end/.