Many years ago, David Commissiong wrote an article entitled Ugly Barbados, in which he noted some aspects of Barbadian society and culture with which he found dissatisfaction. I agreed with most of the points he made then—and I still agree now.
The recent shooting death of a 13-year-old schoolboy in a random explosion of gunfire at Silver Hill in Christ Church must show Barbados at its ugliest. Of course, this was not the first incident of its kind. Remember the shooting death of a woman driving in the back seat of a car on Barbarees Hill, St Michael. Recent stories have been published in the media of children scampering for their lives as gunshots rang out in at least two other neighbourhoods in this country.
Barbados saw a record-breaking 50 homicides in 2024. We already have 13 in the three months of 2025. That is the reality of contemporary Barbados. When we talk glibly about resilience and sustainability in the face of climate change, it must not just be about hurricanes and tsunamis, it must be about the task of confronting the psycho-social climate change that increasingly confronts Barbadians every day. Let me first admit that there are many places on God’s earth, including some in our own region, which are far less habitable than Barbados.
This is all symptomatic of a decline in Barbados that has been going on for some time and to some degree we, the Barbadian people, are all to blame. As a caller to Down to Brass Tacks stated on Monday, March 31, 2025, “we have broken down the guard walls of our morality”. Someone else on that edition of talk radio noted that Barbadians have “lost their way”. We can perhaps all recall when we think we witnessed the change in our country. My own memory of that transformation dates back to when the students at Cave Hill held their first carnival during the Lenten period. It evoked an understandably negative response from the Reverend Sehon Goodridge who was a warden and priest at Christ the King Church, acting as a kind of chaplain to the campus. The offending song at the time was about a character named Raycan. The other event was when some minibus drivers blocked the road at Sargeant’s Village, the year when the Master Mart supermarket in that area was being completed. When I was a student in Jamaica, I boasted to my other Caribbean friends that Barbados had never witnessed a bottle throwing incident at a cricket match at Kensington Oval. As a proud Bajan, I remember feeling a genuine sense of moral superiority. The unfair dismissal of Sherwin Campbell in 1999 changed all that as Barbadians joined the happy band of Caribbean bottle throwers.
It is very difficult if not impossible to hold back the forces of cultural change. The students at Cave Hill still hold their carnival during Lent and the ZR culture is still with us after almost four decades.
Shortly before his passing, Sir Frank Walcott had warned that the ZR culture would destroy Barbados. Apparently, the concern over the state of the spiritual condition of Barbados has now reached the highest levels. Our Prime Minister Mia Mottley has noted a decline in “wholesome values” and that “we have lost our sense of right and wrong”. However, in typical Mottley hyperbole, she claims that “we can shape the world from where we sit”. Forget shaping the world; let’s shape our 166-square-mile island first. Opposition Leader Ralph Thorne has also called for “a return to values” in this ostensibly non-partisan call for moral rearmament. I do not hold out much hope for a political transformation of this country on moral lines.
The politics are already focusing on the next election due in 2027. Beyond the incessant verbiage, we may well lack the political will and moral willpower to effect any meaningful psycho-social amelioration of Barbadian society. One minister of government has already suggested that Barbadians may already be beginning to see crime and violence as normative.
Gun violence is only one dimension of the general breakdown of law and order in Barbados. One hears talk (everybody’s talking) about publicly deviant behaviour in this country. We hear complaints concerning reckless driving on the roads, smoking of ganja in public places, ignoring cautionary red lights, the persistent dumping of garbage in our gullies and beaches, kite flying all day and all night, scamming and price gouging, and a declining sense of empathy.
If, as the prime minister suggests, we are “losing our sense of right and wrong”, this could affect many aspects of engagement—social and economic. Society runs on its values and one of those key ethical values is trust. Commerce would not be viable if there is a declining sense of trust. Tourists will not come to a country where they do not trust the government to afford them a reasonable sense of personal safety. One of the key drawing points about Barbados up to now is that visitors still feel safe. Persons will not invest in securities if they suspect that their monies will not be secure.
Among the words most used by speakers espousing a vision of Barbados’ future are terms such as resilience, sustainability, transparency and, more recently, inclusivity. If these are not themselves moral categories, they all have some moral content. How, for example, can a people be resilient if their work ethic is declining? How can a country be sustainable if its people are persistently and wilfully defiling its environment? Who would want to visit a country where its people are dumping waste on its once pristine beaches? How can we be aiming at inclusivity in a society marked in every turn by exploitation and money grabbing one at the expense of the other? The point that I am belabouring here is that values underscore all aspects of a positive sense of community. What community can we be building if a 13-year-old schoolboy cannot watch a ball game without fear of being shot to death? Where are the critical thinkers who are going to fundamentally repair our Barbados?
Ralph Jemmott is a respected, retired educator and commentator on social issues.
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