Our One Sixty Six

Creating a space for Barbadian creatives to hone and share their talents was long a focus of today's guest, Elombe Mottley. This only grew more once he became the CEO of the National Cultural Foundation. He helps us understand the arts scene of the time and how the national Crop Over Festival fit into that cultural evolution.

This episode is the fourth and final episode of season one of Our One Sixty Six.

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By the late 1970s, Barbados was celebrating a decade of being an independent nation. It was a time for defining and redefining what made things Barbadian. It was a time for Crop Over to come to the big stage. Our guest this week is Elton “Elombe” Mottley, a well-known cultural activist who played an active role in developing the national Crop Over festival.

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It’s been said that Crop Over fell away at some point in the 1900s, but what if that’s just a single story? What practices did we keep as Crop Over moved from the shadow of the plantation? What traditions remain? 

We conclude our discussion with Dr. Marcia Burrowes as she shares with us how we continued to fan the flames of Crop Over celebrations through the centuries.

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In our first episode, our special guest and lecturer in Cultural Studies, Dr. Marcia Burrowes, journeys with us back to the emergence of the Crop Over festival in Barbados; and its foundation in the collision of British and West African cultural rituals.

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Major things happen every day, but with the passage of time, we often forget or simply move on to the next big thing. What things have happened in Barbados’ past, especially in the last century, that have shaped the island we know now? In the first season of Our One Sixty Six we explore the origins of Crop Over, a festival that’s synonymous with Barbados and its sugar-laden colonial past. 

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