Location: Golden Square Freedom Park, Bridgetown
Date: August 23, 2025, International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade
Event : Launch of “Big Conversations” at CARIFESTA XV
Panel theme: “The Idea of Caribbean Civilization”.
Moderator: Dr. Carla Barnett, CARICOM Secretary General
A moment of collective awareness
It was under the trees of Golden Square Freedom Park, the symbolic site of Barbadian labor struggles, that the first major panel debate of CARIFESTA XV opened. Entitled “The Idea of Caribbean Civilization”, this inaugural conversation brought together four of the Caribbean’s leading voices to address an essential question: Can we think of the Caribbean as a civilization in its own right?
This opening panel laid the foundations for what could be a Caribbean architecture of innovation, based on a shared memorial, cultural and political foundation. With this in mind, CARIFESTA XV becomes a space for collective reflection, where memory and the future come together.
Strong words, intersecting trajectories
Dr. Ralph Gonsalves Prime Minister of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, opened the discussion with a definition of civilization as a state of balance between the visible (infrastructures, systems) and invisible (values, behaviors, resistance) dimensions. For him, the Caribbean doesn’t need an empire to be a civilization: “There is a genius resident in our people, made up of hidden rationalities and under-exploited resources”.
Sir Hilary Beckles, Vice-Chancellor of the University of the West Indies, offered a powerful historical fresco in which Barbados emerges as a pivotal territory in the memory of slavery and the struggle for freedom. He recalled that Barbados was the first territory to develop the chattel slavery model, later exported throughout the hemisphere.
➡️ What is chattel slavery?
Derived from the English word chattel, this system considered slaves to be property in the same way as a horse or a house. According to the Barbados Slave Code of 1661, “all Africans arriving on the island shall be considered as chattels and real estate”. This legal regime made slavery a hereditary, racial and transmissible condition, where children were automatically born into slavery, used as currency, mortgage or inheritance. It was this model, initiated in Barbados, that later served as a reference for other British colonies, notably Jamaica and South Carolina.
Dr. June Soomer a diplomat and historian from Saint Lucia, anchored the debate in Caribbean mobilities, the contributions of women and diasporas. She called for a real decolonization of minds, reminding us that “we cannot build a Caribbean civilization by hierarchizing its peoples”.
Finally, Mia Amor Mottley, Prime Minister of Barbados, delivered a masterful speech on the challenges of education, technology and governance on a Caribbean scale. She warned, “The new colonization won’t come by sea, it will enter our minds via digital platforms we don’t control.” She called for a common political and educational space to resist digital standardization.
She illustrated her point with a concrete example: the Barbados Slave Code of 1661. Querying several artificial intelligence platforms, including Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity and other online engines, she found that none could provide an answer, revealing an inability to access this crucial part of Caribbean history. For Mia Mottley, this digital erasure of Caribbean memory reveals a major danger: if our histories disappear from the archives accessible to new generations, then the colonization of minds is already underway. Against this backdrop, CARIFESTA XV takes on its full meaning as a platform for giving voice to forgotten memories.
A shared vision for the future
The panel ended with a shared vision: the Caribbean is already a civilization. Not by imitation, but by crossbreeding, struggle and solidarity. A civilization in the making, at the interface of the African, European, Amerindian, Indian and Asian worlds.
In a final sequence, each speaker was invited to share a final reflection.
Ralph Gonsalves emphasized that any sustainable civilization requires a solid material base and a cooperative institutional structure. He called for a “social individualism” based on solidarity and the sea as a new civilizational frontier.
June Soomer reiterated the importance of conceiving the Caribbean as a collective, rather than as a collection of isolated islands. In her view, the Caribbean will only be able to connect with Africa in the long term if it first consolidates its internal unity.
Hilary Beckles concluded with a powerful critique of the Slave Code of 1661 and a demand: “We, the descendants of this law, say no. We stand for humanity and equal rights . We stand for humanity and equal rights”.
Mia Mottley closed the march with a plea for “scale”: a civilization only lives if it reaches the masses. She called for artists, young people and creators to be mobilized as vectors of influence and transformation. ” In an age of narrowcasting, we need to change the way we reach people’s minds,” she said.
This inaugural panel of CARIFESTA XV reminded us of an essential truth: the Caribbean is not just an archipelago of past resistance, but a civilization on the move. A civilization that is inventing itself collectively, between memory, political courage and creative audacity. It’s up to us, the peoples of the Caribbean, to continue writing this history – together, and in our own way. With moments like CARIFESTA XV, it becomes clear that art, memory and critical thinking are the pillars of a true Caribbean civilization.
In the minds of the organizers, CARIFESTA XV is not just a festival, but a decisive step towards a renewed collective consciousness. By inscribing these debates in history, CARIFESTA XV positions itself as a major milestone in the construction of Caribbean identity and culture.
