by MORRIS GREENIDGE

THE RECENT public discourse on the "slave hut" or "slave houses" seems to have provoked some display of emotion – much of it well meaning – some of it misplaced.

The "debushing" of the property at "Freedom Village" is interesting especially as it follows so closely upon the stay of execution which was granted the Van Roland Edwards house at Chapel Street, Speightstown.

It is also noted that execution orders were summarily carried out on other properties, especially two equally historic, distinctive and even more picturesque houses, one at Upper Roebuck Street near to the Globe Cinema and the other just outside of the north-west gate of Ilaro Court.

To the naked eye these were in fairly good condition and could have been used to alleviate our dire housing problem, but this is a tangent which shall not be here pursued.

The Freedom Village structure is very lucky to have survived the executioner's axe, for it must be recalled that a cluster of similar structures, in pristine condition, was wantonly destroyed at Alleynedale in preparation for the construction of the Duncan O'Neal Highway, as though the highway could not have been negotiated around the structures.

A few days ago a very elderly woman asked to be relieved of her confusion concerning the "slave huts", for she recalled, as a child, seeing very rudimentary timber and mud structures in the parish of St Andrew where she was raised.

They were explained to her as slave huts. Those dwellings which were passed down through direct descendants of her relatives who were former slaves, were nearly all roofed with thatch, ie. Coconut palm fronds and other broad leafed, resilient plants. (See Ann Watson-Yates "Bygone Barbados" p156).

The senior citizen to whom this writer is doubly indebted, is of course correct and some attention had already been paid to this age-old housing solution in the book "Holetown, Barbados, Settlement revisited and other accounts" in whose chapter 12 it is emphatically noted that the structures which are being referred to as 'slave huts" came to be ". . . occupied by blacks only after Emancipation.

Before then, poorly built timber shed and sometime stone outhouses, some with thatched roof, was the answer to the slave housing problem. The floor was the earth and everything was done in the same room.

Chigoes were the most constant companions of the slave: illness and disease were his regular visitors . . . "

The rubble-stone and sometimes stone and timber house was not built for the slave whose possessions were nearly always chattel, ie. removable.

Crofter's house

This "slave hut" is actually the crofter's house which came to Barbados most likely by way of the Scottish and Irish dissidents who later became peasant tenants and small land owners (after their period of indenture or contract) on many of our plantations.

The remainder of the Scots and Irish were elevated to this lofty position, certainly by Abolition.

These dissidents, some of whom were political "prisoners transported" were mostly despised by the English whites and hated by the black slaves.

They therefore lived in nether land and this structure was to them a certain symbol of comeuppance in its original sense.

The croft cottage had been a well known and age-old permanent structure on the British Highlands where peasant farmers cultivated enclosed agricultural lots known as crofts.

The surviving Barbadian buildings would have devolved upon the plantation hierarchy of the ex-slaves and their descendants when the original owners found the post emancipation living arrangements too close and perhaps too darkly familiar for comfort.

It became very difficult to share the same spaces with the newly liberated blacks who would have brought forward their thinly veiled contempt into a swaggering open hostility against the former indentureds.

Concept not new

"There goes the neighbourhood" is not new to Barbados. It is merely being repeated in Country Road, Belleville and Strathclyde in more recent time; in once proud Harlem, in today's Crown Heights. Now it is a virtual scare scourge in Europe where hordes of former French West Africans run triple risks of discrimination, bigotry and murder while on their way to their greener pastures of the European Union, namely Britain and its perceived Jobs and Social Welfare status.

The excellent photograph in Ann Watson-Yates' Bygone Barbados shows a prototype of what the real slaves' huts looked like, quite unlike the "Freedom Village" building and others of its more familiar pattern which were mostly built after the slave trade, but surely not originally for the slaves.

They should not, cannot, be termed "slave huts".

Someone recently said he had seen one "slave hut" in Connell Town.

Fifty years ago, as a young driver, the writer took delight in noting and admiring dozens of the croft cottages in the northern parishes mainly: in Moore's Hill, Sutherland, Retreat, Crab Hill, Alleynedale (aforementioned), Josey Hill, Swampy Town; in Trents, St James.

There was one distinctive building in "Durants Cross Road" and two in Hoyte's Village, the names of whose owners were well known to a certain inquisitive ten year old boy.

A similar structure was also to be found on Dalkeith near the Chinese Embassy.

The real slave hut, in its wattle, daub and thatched frailty, would not survive two hundred years of Caribbean Atlantic weather and the changing social values of blacks in relation to proud house ownership.

What is of architectural historic interest is that hundreds of "four-hip board and shingle" houses were built by blacks after emancipation, which were almost exact timber copies of the walled crofter's hut.

I was born and raised in one.

Several of the crofters' houses have been improved and some lovingly cared by their owners, none more so than that which is owned by the Leacock Family of Black Rock and which has been featured in our news on more than one recent occasion.

This is by no means an attempt to demean the historicity of the "slave huts" for indeed, they serve to point us to an episode in OUR history which must be preserved for posterity and it is to be hoped that Government will quickly enact an Antiquities Bill which will render it very difficult for any ancient structure to be demolished by any one including a Government department, and here one laments the recent demise of the open latrine at the Garrison.

Any structure which reaches back 200 years – and what we call "slave huts" certainly qualify – is most assuredly worthy of preservation and memorialising; but we must get the record right. There are no authentic slaves' huts remaining in Barbados.