Sarah Ann Gill

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Sarah Ann Gill (16 February 1795 – 25 February 1866) was named as one of Barbados's national heroes on the basis of her exploits during the slavery era.^[1]

She was born of a black mother and a white father (Gill), and baptized with the name Ann. The circumstances of her birth disqualified her from any meaningful participation in social and economic life, in a society which was based on racism. In Barbadian society, anyone with a taint of African ancestry, however distant, was considered the natural inferior of all persons of unmixed European descent. Sarah married Alexander George Gill, like her, of mixed ancestry, and inherited property from him at his death when she was 28 years old. The couple had one son who, apparently, died before reaching full adulthood.

When the Methodist Church sent missionaries to Barbados early in the 19th century, Sarah embraced this faith and when white planters succeeded in ousting the missionaries from Barbados, she opened her home as a church and kept the faith going, against physical abuse — at one time shots were fired at her home. She donated the land on which the first Methodist Church was built in Barbados. For her exploits in standing firm against oppression in a society in which she was unlikely to find support firstly, as a non-white person, and, secondly, as a woman ; she was named as a national heroine. The name Sarah was conferred on her by the Methodist Church in gratitude for her service and in recognition of the pivotal role she played, like Sarah of the Bible, in establishing an alternative to the white-dominated Church of England in Barbados.