There have been many calls and attempts to bring Harding back since then. In recent years, many artists and craftspeople have found creative and inspiring ways to play with the iconography of this nearly forgotten folk figure.

Burning him, however, remains a taboo topic.

But why? Are we not facing hard times today? Barbados, like other Caribbean nations, finds itself STARING DOWN A crisis which metastasized from our very own countryside, acres of mono-cropped cane that funded the industrial revolution abroad and the massive first world wealth that has largely left us behind with underdeveloped infrastructure and shocking rates of non-communicable diseases. This runaway capitalism — which, again, mutated in these fields and hills beyond recall before devouring the rest of the western hemisphere — has also accelerated global warming, spawning increasingly stronger hurricanes that race to our shores each year, just like the braided global geopolitical and economic crises we now face.

How many of these modern ills are systemically rooted in the sins of our plantation past? How does everything it has wrought continue to bear down on us today?

If ever we needed a symbol and a tradition to remind us of all we've been through, of all we continue to face, to root us deeper in who we are and must be, we couldn't ask for one more powerful than Mr. Harding.

So why aren't we burning him? Are we not mature and smart enough as a society and a diaspora to interrogate this symbol with the nuance it deserves? To find creative ways of exorcising our colonial hangover on a grassroots level, especially in a historical moment when our political leaders are seeking reparations from those that profited from our dehumanization for centuries?

WITHOUT TRADITIONS SUCH AS burning mr. harding, we lose our living connection to our history of resistance and leaders such as cuffy, tony, nanny grigg and general bussa. Across the region, in countries such as Grenada and Trinidad and Tobago, other masquerade traditions don't hold back when it comes to acknowledging and expressing the defiance and turbulence they sprung from. Barbados similarly needs unbridled, uncensored and unrestricted forms of creative expression that allow us to carry forth the genetic memory of the practices our ancestors used to survive. Without them, this knowledge becomes the stuff of exhibitions and textbooks; vital and necessary, but only part of what we truly need to continue this journey.

Without traditions such as burning mr. harding, we violently sever oral histories and the nation’s generalized understanding of the forces that intertwined to transform barbados into the world’s first slave society and the birthplace of structural racism in the western hemisphere. consider the barbados slave code of 1661, the barbados plantation model, the unbroken ownership of drax hall, the fact that the EARLIEST KNOWN slave song TO BE TRANSCRIBED was DONE SO ON THIS ROCK, aS WELL AS FAR too many facts about barbados’ position as the laboratory in which chattel slavery was concocted. most of us don’t know one blasted thing about this history that continues to shape our present and future; but how could we when we squash and condemn the living traditions that pass this knowing onward? the government is to be commended for its growing upliftment of the LONG-BESIEGED AND RIDICULED pan-african community and various preservation initiatives, but there is so much more to be done in the commons, among every day bajans, many of whom won’t ever set foot in the institutions being built.

Do we understand what happened here? What is still happening here?

Without traditions such as BURNING MR. HARDING — however transgressive — we rob younger generations of ancestral PRACTICE to ground themselves in and a real outlet for the depths of their feeling. Is it any wonder that without this, so many of them, left behind by society, have nowhere else to unleash this feeling than through the barrel of a gun? how many of us have lost loved ones long before bullets came into play? THESE LEVELS OF nihilism AND the SENSELESS, BLOODY VIOLENCE it spawns ARE unprecedented in MODERN Bim.

WITHOUT TRADITIONS SUCH AS burning mr. harding, we LOSE OUR SENSE OF NATURE — SOMETHING WE ARE A PART OF, NOT SOMETHING WE EXPERIENCE OUTSIDE OF OURSELVES — AND INSTEAD MARCH BLINDLY ON EXTRACTING FROM AND IGNORING WHAT THE EARTH IS TELLING US, UNAWARE THAT OUR HOMEGROWN PLANTATION LOGIC IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE ECOLOGICAL COLLAPSE NONE OF US CAN OUTRUN.

Without traditions such as BURNING MR. HARDING, our culture becomes watered down and toothless, ever more beholden to optics and the seemingly almighty power of the tourist dollar. Entertainment at most, but not art in the slightest, and certainly not ceremony. Is it any shock that so many people are complaining about the quality of the music this year and the spiraling costs of fetes? That the Prime Minister has to make the admirable effort to call for the preservation of Calypso and Soca because THEY ARE rapidly disappearing from Crop Over and being supplanted by OTHER GENRES AND foreign acts? Is it any surprise that so many people were disappointed that iShowSpeed’s trip here was so staged and sanitized as compared to his visits to neighboring islands where he experienced real and rooted culture, not performance?

Is it any wonder that the voices calling for a cultural revolution in Barbados are getting louder?

Let them get louder still.

Culture — real, living culture — is not something that can be funded, mandated or “PERMITTED” by the government. This is not to say that the National Cultural Foundation and the ministry of culture serve no purpose. Far from. But without them, would there even be a Crop Over? Go to many other islands and culture and masquerade practices spring first from the people. Mr. Harding is one such practice, previously central AND ORGANIC to Crop Over in its various incarnations, and yet the very mention of burning him invites fear, heavy-handed regulation and swift comments from various commentators and authorities of “No! No! No! You can’t do that!”

And so, we make do with other representations of him. MOST are quite clever and INDEED TREMENDOUSLY welcome, but IN THE WORDS OF KAMAU, “IT IS NOT ENOUGH.” without the ongoing practice of actually burning him, we run the risk of neutering the ritual and sapping it of meaning.

Worse yet, if we eventually do “allow” some form of burning of harding which is devoid of his complicated history and a true and full sense of what he embodies, we risk running afoul of forces far greater than any of us can see.

We need a return to something at the core of our struggle and triumph, to remember who we are, WHO WE WISH tO BE, and what we are actually celebrating. Burning Harding served a real purpose for our forbears, and it must for us as well.

Burning Harding, done correctly, is an act of healing.

It’s because of this that some of us gathered at the outset of this season of emancipation to burn him once again for the first time in many, many years. We did so with deep reverence for those who burned him before us and in renewed defiance of what they faced — and which we continue to FACE as well, albeit in insidious new forms. There is A GREAT DEAL more to be said about what transpired and what was set in motion THAT DAY, but that will come in due time. For now, please know that We will continue to burn him and, moreover, that we invite you to join us.

TOGETHER, WE MUST spark an overdue cultural renaissance in Barbados.
IT IS SIMPLY WAITING FOR US TO LIGHT THE FUSE.