By: Staff Writer
August 26, 2025
Prime Minister of Barbados, Mia Mottley, announced on a panel at the opening of the Carifesta XV.
Mottley, said: “I understood then that we have a story to tell the world. One of the things that pleases my government is that it signed an agreement to purchase the historical records of Banyan Productions out of TT.”
Mottley announced that her government purchased the historical records of Banyan archives from Trinidad and Tobago, which captures the digital archives of the last 40 years of the Caribbean. She committed to making it accessible to everyone in the region. She said the archives will give young people the opportunity to build and create more as a people.
She added: “What we need to do is to recognise that the state is at risk and why? If the only place you can start to shape values in a society now becomes a school because the people who used to watch the common television station ain’t doing so no more… what does that mean? That there is a risk and a temptation that the state will want to strengthen itself to control the society by power rather than by influence,”
Mottley said Barbados would work with the University of the West indies Vice-Chancellor to set up the new institute.
“The government of Barbados feels so strongly about this that we want to work with the University of the West Indies to establish here at Cave Hill the Caribbean Institute for Democracy and Political Governance,” she noted.
She further argued that the Caribbean has long provided the world with examples of unity and coexistence, and must now institutionalise those lessons.
“Our Caribbean civilisation has played a marked role in helping to identify the battles of the world that have been oppressive and tyrannical and trying to fight against it and at the same time giving the world an example of how people of different races and religions can live together, relatively speaking, in the same common space without massive bloodshed,” she also said.
Banyan Productions Ltd, founded in 1974, created several programmes, later founding the TV channel Gayelle The Caribbean.
The company has digitised its archives, which contain at least 15,000 items, and has been trying to find a home for them. A lot of the footage is rare, and often raw and uncut, covering festivals, religion and traditions, art, music, dance, literature, and more.