Rebel Sounds: Musical Resistance in Barbados

Opera singer Peter Brathwaite is fascinated with his Barbadian heritage and ancestry. It's a complicated story; he's descended from both black enslaved people and their enslaving white plantation owners. In a BBC Radio 3 programme Peter travels to Barbados to discover the music made by enslaved people - the cultural glue that bound them to Africa - and the attempts made by the British enslavers to deny, deride or override this music.

MY NAME is Peter Brathwaite. I’m an opera singer. I was born in Manchester, where my childhood was defined by music.

And while I have to confess that from a very early age, I’ve been enamoured with the sweet strains of American soul/funk star Chaka Khan, for the most part my musical experience was shaped by something else, something very English – the Anglican Choral Tradition. I was built upon a diet of liquid Tudor motets and meaty Victorian anthems.

But as a second generation British Barbadian or ‘Bajan Brit’, there’s always been a silence within me – the silence of Barbadian musical heritage. ‘Rebel Sounds’, my documentary for BBC Radio 3 is my journey to discover that heritage – my ancestors and the music that they heard, played, sung…

It’s a story that has something big at its heart. Something horrific….

Newton Slave Burial Ground

This is the Newton Slave Burial Ground —  the largest and earliest burial ground for enslaved people discovered in Barbados. On this spot I’m confronted with the devasting impact of slavery in the Caribbean. An institution founded on the notion that a Black life was not a human life: it was property, property that helped fill the coffers of the enslaving British plantation owners.

From the years 1627 to 1807, nearly 400,000 human beings were kidnapped, sold and shipped in horrific conditions from West Africa, across the Atlantic ocean, to Barbados, to work the sugar plantations of British Landowners.

Peter at the Newton Slave Burial Ground

In my programme we visit the plantations worked by enslaved Africans and their descendants, discover the music in their lives, and even meet my Barbadian ancestors. And speaking of my ancestors, there’s something you should know about them right away. They weren’t all enslaved. In fact, I’m related both to enslaved black Africans AND to the white British Landowners who owned them – that’s where I get the name Brathwaite… the Brathwaites were an enslaving dynasty on the island of Barbados. so… let’s just say it’s complicated.

In our programme, we focus on three Brathwaites: my great, great, great, great grandfather and grandmother Addo and Margaret, who were enslaved, and Margaret’s father Miles, who was a white British plantation owner and enslaver. They lived in the Eastern Parish of St Philips.

I have been wanting to come to Three Houses Park for a long time, because this is where both my white ancestors and my black ancestors lived and worked. Three Houses Spring is where during the time of slavery people would have come to wash their clothes, get water for livestock. It is a really significant site for me – somewhere that is full of pain, but also brings out thoughts of rejuvenation, and the resilience of those people as well. […] Being in such a tranquil and beautiful park, yet knowing it was the land in which one side of my family enslaved the other was harrowing. But Three Houses Plantation wasn’t where Addo lived out his life. Because he was freed, or “manumitted” from enslavement in 1817.

The (white) Brathwaite family mausoleum in St Philip’s Parish Churchyard

Moving from Addo to Margaret, my great, great, great, great grandmother, she is a really fascinating figure for me, not least because she founded a Brathwaite Family Festival 200 years ago that we still celebrate to this day.

To talk about Margaret, I met up with a Jamaican cousin of mine, Lisa Suarez Lewis, in the Eastern Parish of St Philip, in the Parish Church, which is an impressive coral stone church that juts out of the landscape. On the way into the churchyard, we found the mausoleum of Miles Brathwaite, one of our white enslaver ancestors. We are here to talk about Margaret – Miles’ daughter. Lisa has a wealth of knowledge about her life story and her connection to the white enslaver Brathwaite family.

Lisa says: “The question of whether Margaret was the daughter of Miles Brathwaite’s is not one that can be found easily on paper. Her mother would have been a black slavewoman who is nameless, would not have had a marked grave, would not be in the St Philip’s Parish Churchyard.

“Margaret was manumitted by Miles, her father. Edward – who was Addo – his manumission was paid for £50 at the time – an enormous amount – so the additional substratum of the story is that there were some prizes for good behaviour. And when Addo got married to Margaret (he was 38 years her senior – in his mid-70s when he was freed) had 11 children.”

Outside the Church of the Holy Cross:

I am standing outside the Church of the Holy Cross, and being here with these people – many of them descendants of the enslaved people who worshipped here when this was originally formed as a chapel for enslaved people – I realised that it is a joyful thing to see a place where my ancestors sat and prayed and sang, but also there is this weight of knowing that for many of the people that came here originally, this was a forced activity – they had to put aside the culture that they knew and loved, and adopt something that wasn’t really their own and find a way to find a meaning in what they were taught.

Looking out of the window, just to the left of the chapel, I can see the Atlantic Ocean – all churches face East, that’s a given, but knowing where the original communicants f this chapel came from, across the Atlantic Ocean, in West Africa, you can’t help but think about the loss, the great loss that happened on this site, and many other sites like it. It was a pleasure for me to look at the congregation today, and spot little flecks of African wax print fabric, dresses made from this fabric. It really shows how people today, Anglicans in this country, have renewed and transformed the past that is very present here, into something that is meaningful for them and is a way of navigating through life today.  

At the start of this documentary I mentioned a silence within me – a second-generation Bajan Brit raised within a very English musical and educational tradition. There are things I’ll simply never know about my black Barbadian ancestors, and what I have managed to piece together is thanks to extensive and, occasionally obsessive research.

This clutching at fragments is in itself dehumanising, so , for me, what making this programme has made me appreciate above all is that these were human beings. They ate, drank, they danced, they sang, they loved: they lived. Behind the devastating numbers, the harrowing details of daily life and the constant attempt to deny the souls of these black people: they lived.

And what they lived for, lives on. When Barbadian children learn folk songs in music class; when Bajans dance their way towards the emancipation statue at the annual Cropover festival; when my mum makes me Coucou at home in Manchester: they live on.

Rebel Sounds: Musical Resistance in Barbados

Jobson gets the lead in ‘Platform 7’

Comments Form

5 Comments

  1. | Joan Phillips

    God bless you Peter & thank you so much for your work & research. And most of all thank you for sharing 💖

    Reply

  2. | Sophia. Turner

    Amazing research well done to my brother Peter ,who has worked really hard on research tools to tell the true story of our family heritage.

    Reply

  3. | Andrew

    Excellent programming with suburb knowledge.

    Congratulations
    Andrew

    Reply

  4. | Sandy McPhoenix

    Thank you for a wonderful programme – so moving. I’ve been haunted by the song you sang in the burial ground, “Master buy me, he won’t kill me”. Made me feel so much – anger and sadness, but also that human being connecting with me and surviving across time.

    Reply

  5. | Valencia Gittens

    I love it Peter. So educational, keep on with the good works. I definitely love the cultural ancestral look at Barbados. I’m from S Philip. 👏❤️

    Reply

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