Barbados: descendants of European slaveowners march to apologize for slavery

Bound and shackled, dozens of white descendants of European slaveowners slowly marched through Barbados' capital yesterday in a symbolic gesture of apology for slavery.

Curious motorists slowed down and peered out their windows as some 50 white men and women wound through Bridgetown under a blazing sun, some with chains around their wrists and ankles and wooden yokes around their necks.

David Pott, a London native who led the group of foreigners and Barbadians, said the march was meant as a symbolic form penitence for the trans-Atlantic slave trade that shipped nearly 400,000 Africans to Barbados between the 17th and 19th centuries to toil on sugar plantations.

The group marched from the Emancipation Statue outside Bridgetown to Newton Plantation, a still active sugar plantation that once teemed with slaves.

Barbados is a former British colony of 278,000 people. Britain abolished slavery in Barbados in 1834, AP reports. P.T.