This is the Guardian.

Today, Barbados wakes up as the world's newest republic.

Can it free itself from the history that got it here?

The first British monarch to claim Barbados was James I.

At midnight last night, local time, Elizabeth II became the last.

From today, Barbados has a president, Sandra Mason, and some hope and opportunity to move forward on a journey that started with the emancipation of enslaved people nearly 200 years ago, but isn't over.

I'm in Bridgetown to try to understand what this moment means for the future of Barbados.

And people keep telling me to get what's coming next. You need to look back. From the Guardian, I'm Michael Safi. Today in focus, Barbados becomes a republic and Britain faces a reckoning.

Before we start, just a heads up. Today's episode includes descriptions of torture and other violence.

About half hours drive from Bridgetown, the capital of Barbados, is the most shockingly green landscape.

There's vegetation everywhere, palm trees, fruit, rich soil, the sounds of birds and crickets.

This is where S. the Philips, the country's poet laureate, grew up.

This was a place where I remember very well, my grandmother had planted up this land because we lived off the land.

Everything you could think of, a pumpkin, Christopher, beans, carrots, beets. It was a childhood where there was a lot of freedom to run and all the fresh air and the fresh fruits looking down plums and goavers.

S. this family home was right next to this place called the Drax Hall Estate, a sugar cane plantation. It's been there 400 years and it's still producing sugar today.

Her grandfather worked there in the 50s, drawing canes, and their home was surrounded by the estate on the east, south and west.

S. the can remember as a kid catching glimpses of the people working there and the people running it.

Sometimes in walking home from school, people find ourselves walking through Drax Hall yard. So of course we saw the plantation house.

Sometimes it's got a glimpse of these little white children. Then sometimes of course it was overseer that we were all scared of and tried our best to run from.

But we did not know why. We knew that this place represented something that was alien to us or was not friendly.

What we did not know was the history. We had no idea.

I am still processing how it is possible that I grew up all these years not knowing the horror that existed some hundred years ago. Not far away from here.

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