Sounds of Freedom III - Esther Phillips - 3 - “Monkey Noko”

Sounds of Freedom III - Esther Phillips - 3 - “Monkey Noko”

Sounds of Freedom III: Esther Phillips and the legend of Monkey Noko digs into the haunting legacy of Drax Hall Plantation and the unfinished business of emancipation in Barbados. Against the backdrop of one of the hemisphere’s oldest sugar estates, Phillips reflects on growing up in the shadow of Drax Hall without ever being told its brutal history of sugar and slavery. Through her poem “Monkey Noko”, she interrogates loyalty, survival, silence and complicity on the plantation, and asks what it cost to gain a white master’s favour in a world built on Black dispossession.

House on James Street: Episode two - Building a slave society

In Episode Two - "Building A Slave Society" - House on James Street explores the roots of the world that would one day define Sarah Ann Gill. Joining us is historian Professor Pedro Welch, who walks us through the 17th-century transformation of Barbados into a laboratory of plantation slavery. We trace how an overwhelmingly African population, brought from the Gold Coast, was systematically dehumanized by a "plantocracy"—and how they maintained their humanity within a brutal system that categorized them as property. From the specific names recorded in 1654 plantation lists to the complex bureaucratic labels used for the growing free coloured population—FM, FN, and FC—this episode uncovers the rigid social structures that dictated life in early Barbados. We begin to see how this history of violence, intimacy, and resistance created the very environment that Sarah Ann Gill would one day navigate and challenge. Produced and presented by Julius Gittens from a National Library Service lecture by late historian Professor Pedro Welch.

Sounds of Freedom III - Esther Phillips - 2 - “Hard Love - Odifo's Story"”

This episode of Sounds of Freedom III traces the journey of a boy named Odifo and the enslaved mothers who loved – and lost – their children on Barbados’s sugar estates, through the words of poet and former Poet Laureate of Barbados, Esther Phillips. In this episode, Phillips reads her searing poem “Hard Love” and reflects on the emotional terror, brutality and impossible “adjustments” enslaved women were forced to make, knowing their babies could be sold away at any moment. Host Shayla Murrell guides listeners through the soundscape of Drax Hall plantation in St George – once owned by James and Henry Drax – evoking the heat, cane dust and the small, weary bodies of children who laboured there, where nearly 30,000 enslaved Africans perished over two centuries. This episode offers a powerful meditation on emancipation, memory and the long shadow of wealth built on the suffering of enslaved families in Barbados.

New episodes: House on James Street

Before Sarah Ann Gill became a National Hero, she was a free woman in Bridgetown — navigating a society built on the brutal logic of slavery. In this episode, we step into her world to explore the precarious, complex lives of free coloured women in early 19th-century Barbados. The late historian Professor Pedro Welch unpacked the strategies these women — tavern owners, property holders, and political actors—used to carve out autonomy in a discriminatory society. From the political courage of Alexander Gill’s 1811 petition to the extraordinary, behind-the-scenes influence of Betty Goodwin in the Governor’s residence, we examine how wealth, negotiation, and survival paved the way for Sarah Ann Gill’s future defiance. House on James Street - a radio documentary series only on Radio Bimshire - explores the contradictions of love, power, and property — and set the stage for the moment one house on James Street would change history. Produced and presented by Julius Gittens

Sounds of Freedom III - Esther Phillips - 1 - “Choice Young Negro”

Sounds of Freedom is a journey through the soundscape of emancipation, memory, and hope. In episode one from a new season, host Shayla Murrell sits with Barbadian poet, teacher, and editor Esther Phillips, Barbados’ first Poet Laureate, to explore the making and meaning of her poem “Choice Young Negro”. Drawing on a chilling 1979 instruction manual written by plantation owner Henry Drax for the running of Drax Hall Estate, the conversation unpacks how enslaved Africans were reduced to “units” of labour and profit — and how poetry can turn that language back on itself. Esther’s poem responds to Drax’s demand for “choice young Negroes” by restoring the enslaved as sons, daughters, and freedom fighters from the Coromantee people, whose strength and resistance haunted the sugar empire that tried to break them. Through archive, verse, and voice, this episode situates Drax Hall within the wider history of Caribbean slavery, where historians estimate that close to 30,000 enslaved Africans died on Drax plantations in Barbados and Jamaica. Hear how those lives still echo in Barbados today — not as a mere footnote to empire, but as a living call to remember, reckon, and imagine freedom anew.