Mia Mottley

Okay.

We is we.

Dying fair.

I almost feel like that's a perfect place to start a conversation because...

If we think of Rihanna as a concept and as an idea, you have a single human who has had an outsized impact on the world.

They came from a place that many would have considered insignificant.

They started in a place that many people would have considered unremarkable.

And yet there's no denying that music, fashion, beauty has now been shaped by this person.

Absolutely.

I feel like your journey and the journey of Barbados has been very similar.

Truth is that the journey of Barbados before has been there for good and bad reasons.

And let's start with the bad.

Yeah.

Barbados was settled.

In fact, this is 400 years this year that the British first landed.

But then history was written that they were the first, although we now know that people were probably there who came from Europe.

But the story that nobody told was the Amerindians who lived there for centuries and who at the time when the British came, there was evidence of settlements and life, but nobody had been living on the island at the time.

I start there really to carry you to the fact that the modern story of Barbados then is shaped by the British conquest.

And they started a parliament in 1639.

It's the third oldest in the Commonwealth.