BARBADOS CUTS ITS COLONIAL TIES

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31231, 1 December 1966, Page 17

BARBADOS CUTS ITS COLONIAL TIES

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter—Copyright)

BRIDGETOWN, November 30.

Barbados became the world’s smallest independent nation at midnight after more than three centuries of continuous British rule.

The island, claimed by a group of English merchant adventurers on behalf of the British Crown in 1625, emerged as a sovereign state as spotlights blazed on its blue

and gold national colours, run up on a 45ft flagpole at the Savannah racecourse in Bridgetown, the capital.

Thousands of Barbadians stood bareheaded as Queen Elizabeth’s cousin, the Duke of Kent, handed the Prime Minister, Mr Errol Barrow, the Queen’s official assent to the ending of the long colonial tie.

Fireworks blazed and

Bridgetown throbbed to the beat of steel bands as street dancing heralded the new nation’s birth. Barbados—the most easterly island in the West Indies and, with 250,000 inhabitants, the most densely populated—is the fourth British Caribbean territory to gain pendenceFollowing in the steps of Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana, the 166-square mile island will become the 26th independent member of the Commonwealth.

But the island, with 89 per cent of its population descending from African slaves imported to work on sugar plantations in the eighteenth

century, is expected to fix its eyes more firmly on the Western Hemisphere. Mr Barrow indicated the new nation’s reorientation away from London and towards the Americas yesterday. He announced that Barbados would apply to join the Organisation of American States as soon as possible and would seek to form a bloc of Commonwealth nations, including Canada, within the hemispheric grouping. The tiny isle whose main assets are sun, surf, and sugar, entered independence with one of the smallest defence forces in the world—about 500 regular police and a 250-strong volunteer military battalion. For its diplomatic representation in London, Ottawa and Washington, it will use the services of Guyanese envoys already stationed in the three capitals. On admission to the United Nations, expected within the next week or so, the Government will, however, maintain a small permanent United Nations staff of civil servants.