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December 1, 2021

Barbados: The World’s Newest Republic has a New Female President

BRIDGETOWN, Barbados — On Nov. 30, 2021, Barbados celebrated its 55th Anniversary of Independence from Britain as a new republic for the first time in history.

The President of Barbados is now Dame Sandra Mason, former Governor-General who was Queen Elizabeth’s appointed representative to the island since 2017. President Mason was the first woman to be admitted to the bar in Barbados in 1970. The 72-year-old former lawyer, judge and diplomat was elected by parliament in October. She is a proud alma mater of the University of the West Indies.

There is no major difference in the way Barbados will now operate but it’s worth noting that the first president of the new republic will be a Bajan woman. Queen Elizabeth II has been removed as the Head of State.

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She is joined by another Bajan woman, Prime Minister Mia Mottley, who remains as head of the government. PM Mottley became the nation’s eighth, and first female, prime minister in 2018.

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As the new president and new republic come on the heels of the removal of the Queen as head of state, another queen— Bajan Queen Rihanna was named National Hero of Barbados as the republic’s commencement ceremony.

Queen Elizabeth II had been the symbolic head of state of Barbados since it won independence from England in 1966. The tentacles of colonialism stretched back more than three hundred years before that when English settlers arrived, turning the island into a sugar colony that thrived off the work of imported African slaves.

[Additional Read: HERstory: 5 Badass French Caribbean Women Intellectuals That Need to Be in History Books]

The push for full independence started in the 1990s but it wasn’t until 2020 when Barbados announced plans to sever ties once and for all. The Black Lives Matter movement and cries for racial and social justice around the globe resonated on the island of approximately 300,000 residents. Perhaps the most glaring example of sweeping change happened last November when PM Mottley ordered a statue of British naval hero Lord Horatio Nelson to be removed from a prominent position in the capital to a museum.

PM Mottley said during the removal ceremony:

“While we accept that the statue of Vice-Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson is an important historical relic, it is not a relic to be placed in the National Heroes Square of a nation that has to fight for too long to shape its destiny.”

The destiny of the easternmost island in the Caribbean is now being shaped by the female descendants of African slaves. President Mason told Yahoo! News that it’s her dream for a Caribbean version of the European Union to form.

“I am a zealot when it comes to Caribbean-ness. I believe in regional integration. I believe that it is something that has to come to fruition,” Mason said.

With two West Indian women at the helm of the Caribbean’s newest republic, anything is possible.

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