There are also annual complaints about the judging of the calypso competitions and, to a much lesser extent, the fact that the zenith of Crop-Over clashes with Emancipation Day. They are both national holidays in Barbados; Emancipation is celebrated on August 1, while Kadooment Day is the first Monday in the month. Unlike in Jamaica where Independence Day on August 6 and Emancipation Day support each other in the prolonged Jamaica Festival, the carnival-type revelries overshadow the anniversary of Abolition in Barbados. Yet they are both celebrations in the August season with historical roots in resistance, liberation, the performing arts and tradition.

In its present form, Crop-Over began in 1974 and this makes it, like Jamaica, a national traditional festival of recent vintage. But, unlike Jamaica, and more like the carnival heritage in the Eastern Caribbean, it is the contemporary vestige of a very old tradition.

Its origins are traced to 1787 when the plantation managers organized an end-of-crop fete to reward the enslaved workers at the end of the sugar harvest each year. Barbadian social historian Trevor Marshall describes it as “Christmas in August,” a one-day carnival in which the planters joined the enslaved in games and dancing. According to Curwin Best, an authority on popular culture, it was called ‘Harvest Home Festival’ and the slave population was allowed to practise their own jollifications.

It is here that it first took on the flavour of resistance, because once the people had this official cover, they seized the opportunity to pull out covert insurrectionary theatrical activities that would normally be curtailed by legislation. This included the practice of satire, which, with a similar history, became an important part of the carnivalesque tradition across the Caribbean and a part of Emancipation celebrations since 1838. Satire, of course, has been at the core of the calypso since it emerged in the English-speaking Caribbean somewhere in the 1790s.

However, there was no direct, unbroken line of development which continued or evolved into the contemporary festival, although Marshall cites oral evidence to suggest that it continued on some estates in Barbados up to the 1950s, beginning to fade away around 1945. Best believes it resurfaced significantly around the 1920s when, perhaps, the name “crop-over” was first used. Then between 1957 and 1963 there was an annual carnival organized by the Jaycees, a pageant modelled on Trinidad, but reputed to be for the elite. Despite that, it was there that the calypso competition began, continuing intermittently under independent management through the sixties, at one time run by the Yoruba Yard, an Afro-centric cultural organization.

After all that, Crop-Over as currently known in Barbados, officially began in 1974, initiated by the Tourist Board in order to attract arrivals in what was the mid-summer off-season, but it immediately became a major success, capturing the interest of the local population. The government adopted it and it is now run by the National Cultural Foundation. The Calypso King competition was formalized in 1978, the Road March title in 1979, and other traditions followed. There is now a different contest for the ‘Party Monarch,’ as opposed to the major title now called the ‘Pic-o-the-Crop’ in which calypsonians have to perform two songs and show their skills at social commentary and picon. There is a Junior Calypso crown, ‘Kiddies Kadooment,’ and a ‘People’s Monarch’ decided by a straight popular vote.

The season begins to warm up in late June. There are calypso tents, beach parties and the ‘Cohobblopot’ show at which the King and Queen of the Bands are judged. The costumed bands themselves are judged on Kadooment Day, the last day of the festival. But these aspects of the street parade seem less emphasized in the same way that the other artistic performances outside of calypso are on the periphery, quite different from what happens in Jamaica. Even in Trinidad, costumed bands are a major spectacle and, in fact, one of the main showpieces of the carnival. At the end of the Barbadian festivity, the long march on the road is for fun and the ‘last lap’ of revelry.

This last lap used to end in the biggest symbol which links crop-over with its history and its past theme of liberation. The ‘burning of Mr Harding’ was the final act at the end of Kadooment Day until it was stopped early in the decade of the nineties. It used to be quite a spectacle in which a towering effigy of ‘Mr Harding,’ a planter figure made of straw and rags, dressed in coat and hat and standing some 20 feet tall, was set afire. He was a symbol of “hard times,” sugar, slavery and oppression. His torching was a release from hardship, the end of the crop, “a looking forward to profits and better seasons; the end of the festival, the burning of passions and the spirit of revelry” (Curwin Best).

This symbolic conflagration gave way to fireworks more than a decade ago, but then both were stopped because the authorities feared the acts of the socially irresponsible.

They wanted to prevent passions and high spirits becoming carried away and destructive use of flames in the hands of unruly elements with twenty thousand people on the streets on Kadooment evening.

That might be the loss of a popular spectacle and a symbol of tradition, but Crop-Over now exists as the major cultural festival of Barbados. It is a folk tradition which sets almost all its people afire. It is highly commercial, a lucrative tourist attraction which also sets not only the large influx of visitors, but the national bank account aglow.