Last Friday, Barbadian Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley announced the development of the Barbados Heritage District with Ghanaian-British architect David Adjaye leading its design. The cultural center will be located at Newton Plantation, located just outside the country’s capital Bridgetown.

The announcement arrives in the wake of Barbados’ transition to a Parliamentary Republic, which saw the removal of Queen Elizabeth as its head of state and the induction of Sandra Mason as its president. According to the country’s statement, the district will be “dedicated to accurately recounting the historic and contemporary impact of slavery on Barbados and on the lives of individuals, cultures, and nations of the Western hemisphere.” It will include a major global research institute, a museum that will house the largest collection of British slave records outside of the United Kingdom, and a memorial located at the Newton Burial Ground, the largest and earliest slave burial ground in Barbados where the remains of hundreds of enslaved people were discovered in the 1970s. 

The Barbados Heritage District will also serve to develop and promote Barbados’ identity, culture, and place internationally as well as support job growth in new industries, technologies, and construction sectors. Work on the first phase of the project, the construction of the Newton Enslaved Burial Ground Memorial, will commence on November 20, 2022, the first anniversary of Barbados’ status as a republic. 

The project is being developed in partnership with the Prime Minister’s Office, the Barbados Archives Department, and the Barbados Museum and Historical Society, who are working with a team of Barbadian scholars. 

“Barbados is authentically enshrining our history and preserving the past as we reimagine our world and continue to contribute to global humanity,” said Prime Minister Mottley. “It is a moral imperative but equally an economic necessity.” 

According to the press release, the Newton Enslaved Burial Ground Memorial will have an “inherently African design in which the cycle of birth to death, born from the Earth and returning, becomes manifest and mediated through architecture.”

As stated by Adjaye: “Drawing upon the technique and philosophy of traditional African tombs, prayer sites and pyramids, the memorial is conceived as a space that contemporaneously honours the dead, edifies the living, and manifests a new diasporic future for Black civilization that is both of the African continent and distinct from it.”

Visitors will enter the site within a monolithic dome pavilion made of red laterite earth where historical information about the burial ground and slave trade will be presented. An oculus will frame views of the “cosmos” and an aquifer will connect visitors to the water underneath the site. The southern entry point to the memorial is defined by an ascending, floating ramp. The memorial itself sits at the highest point of the sloped site and is defined by a circular mound composed of Barbadian rammed earth. This frames a square field of 570 vertical timber beams, honoring the 570 African slaves who were uncovered at the burial ground. 

Along the perimeter of the memorial, a floating bench allows for “individual reflection, observation, and respite.” A void at the center of the timber forest is intended to host libations, ceremonies, and secular events.

As read in the announcement: “The duality embedded within this ethereal landscape is heightened as the architecture balances earth and sky, water and land, the ancestors and the living, this world and the next.”