On August 1, the world marked the 192nd anniversary of the British Empire’s abolition of chattel slavery across its colonial territories. For the twin-island nation of Antigua and Barbuda, however, this historic milestone of emancipation has been largely drowned out by the revelry of annual Carnival celebrations. So little effort is made to connect modern citizens to this painful, transformative chapter of their history that even young secondary school students typically cannot explain what August 1 represents—a worrying gap that echoes the old warning that forgetting history leaves societies vulnerable to repeating its worst mistakes.
This year’s anniversary arrived against a fraught backdrop: Antigua and Barbuda has been labeled a “failed state” by U.S. officials, facing a de facto entry ban for most of its citizens and the looming threat of losing visa-free access to the European Union. Today, any Antiguan or Barbudan applying for a U.S. travel visa must first attend an in-person appointment at the Bridgetown U.S. Embassy, only to almost always receive a formal denial. Worse, eligible applicants are required to post a cash bond of nearly $15,000, refunded only if they depart the U.S. by their mandated deadline.
While these external restrictions have upended life for many citizens, the article’s author, Yves Ephraim, argues that the nation’s overreliance on access to wealthy Western nations has long served as a distraction from holding domestic leadership accountable. For generations, many Antiguans and Barbudans have responded to systemic corruption, incompetent governance, and stagnant progress at home by choosing to emigrate to the U.S., Canada, or the U.K. This exit strategy has allowed citizens to escape victimization by the state, but it has also removed the pressure for the grassroots organizing needed to drive the transformative change that would make Antigua and Barbuda a safe, prosperous place to live, work, raise families, and build long-term security.
Ephraim frames the current travel ban crisis as an unexpected opportunity: a moment for all citizens to set aside celebrations and confront hard questions about the nation’s trajectory. To do this meaningfully, he argues, citizens must first revisit the root causes of African chattel slavery, which he says are often misunderstood. Long framed primarily as a racial injustice, slavery was first and foremost an economic project: a system designed to extract wealth from colonized lands for European powers.
After European powers claimed Caribbean lands through conquest and “discovery,” they identified cash crops like sugarcane as the primary engine of wealth extraction. With indigenous populations decimated by disease and violence, European colonizers turned to enslaved African people as a source of abundant, low-cost labor that could endure brutal working conditions. Racial dehumanization was not the cause of slavery, Ephraim argues—it was a after-the-fact justification to ease the conscience of Christian colonizers profiting from mass exploitation. When sugar profits declined in the early 20th century and labor organizing grew stronger, most colonial landowners abandoned their estates and returned to Europe, leaving Antiguans and Barbudans to build their own economy.
Looking back on his childhood in the 1960s, Ephraim describes a post-emancipation renaissance of local ownership and entrepreneurship. Local farmers dominated vibrant Saturday markets, and a growing ecosystem of indigenous Antiguan and Barbudan businesses anchored the capital St. John’s. Today, he says, that vibrancy is gone: iconic local businesses like Delos J. Martin have shuttered, and the economic structure that defined colonial sugar slavery has reemerged in a new form, tied to tourism and real estate development.
The trend of foreign re-conquest of land is most stark in Barbuda, where major coastal areas and surrounding islands including Long Island and Maiden Island have been transferred as permanent freehold property to wealthy foreign investors from former colonial powers, rather than being leased to retain national control. These transfers come with massive tax and regulatory concessions that do little to benefit local communities. Driven by short-term profit motives, current leadership has allowed the gentrification of Barbuda, transforming a once self-sustaining community that drew its livelihood from land and sea into a population dependent on low-wage jobs, where many locals can no longer afford to live on the island.
Ephraim argues this pattern amounts to deliberate recolonization: leaders, lured by the promise of quick national revenue and personal gain, have handed over land that was bought and paid for by the blood, sweat, and taxes of enslaved people and their descendants to foreign investors, in open disregard for the needs and wishes of the Barbudan people.
After the collapse of the sugar industry, tourism emerged as the new core of Antigua and Barbuda’s economy. In its early days, the sector was dominated by local owners, but as governments prioritized rapid growth, little was done to support continued local ownership by ordinary citizens. Today, not a single major tourism property is controlled by indigenous private Antiguan and Barbudan owners, leaving the entire sector fully dominated by foreign entities. This model is deeply volatile, Ephraim warns: a single travel advisory from the U.S., U.K., or EU could shut down the entire national economy overnight. Shifting marketing to attract Spanish and South American travelers provides only short-term relief and is not a sustainable long-term strategy.
Like the sugar system that preceded it, modern tourism relies on a large pool of low-skilled, low-wage manual labor—a model that does nothing to build a skilled, empowered citizenry capable of driving long-term national development. Today, echoing the colonial practice of importing exploitable labor, leaders have turned to foreign workers from the Dominican Republic, China, the Philippines, and other nations, dismissing young Antiguans and Barbudans as having a poor work ethic.
In sum, Ephraim’s analysis finds that after 44 years of formal independence, Antigua and Barbuda has reversed the progress won through emancipation, returning most of its valuable land and economic control to the descendants of the original colonizers. Just as in the sugar era, foreign entities extract the vast majority of profits from tourism and land sales, repatriating them to overseas bank accounts and home countries, leaving locals with only low-wage, low-skill jobs that are increasingly being filled by imported workers. Increasingly, even public lands and beaches are being closed off to local citizens—a mirror of the old plantation regime that excluded enslaved people from accessing the land their labor built.
Ephraim contrasts this current state with the post-colonial renaissance of the mid-20th century, when local skilled workers, small business owners, and entrepreneurs controlled most of the nation’s economy, including the first wave of post-sugar hotels. Today, he argues, a culture of political handouts has eroded work incentives: why would young people work hard when political patronage offers easy handouts for those who curry favor with ministers and representatives?
To reverse this trajectory, Ephraim calls for a strategic pivot to investing in domestic human capital, specifically training citizens in information technology skills that can be sold remotely to wealthy countries facing skilled labor shortages. This goal is already within reach, he notes, thanks to existing educational institutions including the UWI Five Island Campus and the Antigua and Barbuda Institute of Information Technology. To realize this potential, however, the government will need to deregulate the business and telecom sectors to create a more open environment for digital entrepreneurship.
Ephraim emphasizes a core truth: no nation can build sustainable prosperity unless its own citizens build wealth through productive ownership of the domestic economy. Wealthy citizens, he argues, are the only foundation for a wealthy nation. To navigate the current travel ban crisis and build an independent, prosperous future, Antigua and Barbuda must completely rethink its approach to land use, labor development, and wealth generation. With no clear plan from current leadership to address the crisis, even in the worst-case scenario of a full, permanent ban, Ephraim leaves readers with pressing questions: Are current leaders clueless about the way forward? And is there still time to change course?
