MONROVIA — Liberia’s special envoy for cultural and heritage diplomacy has been invited to the opening of a national memorial in Barbados honoring 570 enslaved West Africans buried at a former sugar plantation.
By Rodney D. Sieh
Ambassador Lorenzo Llewellyn Witherspoon received the invitation from the office of Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley for the Nov. 28 opening of the Ancestral Memorial to the Enslaved at Newton, outside the capital, Bridgetown. Guests must confirm attendance by Oct. 23.
“Being personally invited by Prime Minister Mottley to witness this historic event is an important honor for Liberia and me personally,” Witherspoon said.
The ceremony falls two days before Barbados marks 60 years of independence and five years as a republic.
The memorial stands beside the Newton Enslaved Burial Ground, believed to be the largest communal burial site of enslaved people in the Western Hemisphere. The remains were identified using LIDAR, a laser-mapping technology.
Designed by British-Ghanaian architect David Adjaye, the memorial draws on traditional African tombs, prayer sites and pyramids. Visitors enter through a dome of red earth housing exhibits on the slave trade, then climb a sugarcane-lined ramp to a mound holding 570 teak poles from Ghana, one for each person buried there. Each pole is topped with a brass plate angled toward the sun.
Adjaye’s firm says the design seeks to balance “the ancestors and the living, this world and the next.”
The memorial is the first phase of the Barbados Heritage District, announced in 2021 after the island removed the British monarch as head of state. The district is also planned to include a national museum, archives and a genealogical research institute.
Liberia’s ties to Barbados date to 1865, when Barbadian families sailed aboard the brig Cora and settled in Crozierville, outside Monrovia, at the invitation of the Liberian government. Their descendants became prominent in Liberian law, politics and media.
Witherspoon said research into his own Caribbean ancestry, which he began in 2019, led to a meeting with Mottley at her official residence, Ilaro Court, in 2020. She tasked him with organizing the 2024 Sankofa Pilgrimage, which brought more than 500 descendants of the Barbadian emigrants back to the island.
He also helped facilitate diplomatic relations between the two countries and a 2025 state visit to Liberia by Barbados President Sandra Mason.
The two countries signed visa waiver and political consultation agreements in March.
“Thanks to the visionary leadership of President Boakai, a 160-year hiatus in the relationship between Barbados and Liberia has been broken,” Witherspoon said.
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