Flag of Antigua and Barbuda

How to read it

The government of Antigua and Barbuda says the flag was designed by Reginald Samuel in 1966 and adopted on 27 February 1967, when Antigua became an associated state of Britain. Norway’s national encyclopedia, Store norske leksikon, says Samuel, an artist, won the competition for the design, and that at independence in 1981 the flag was confirmed as the flag of the new state. It describes a red flag, three units long for every two high, with a V-shaped field cut into it from the two top corners to the middle of the bottom edge. The V is divided into black, blue and white horizontal stripes in the ratio 18:10:18, and on the black is a rising sun with seven whole and two half pointed rays. The government calls it a seven-point golden sun. The same flag is the national flag, the state flag and the flag for merchant ships, the encyclopedia says.

Also searched as: antigua and barbuda flag, antigua and barbuda flag meaning, antiguan flag, antiguan flag meaning, flag of antigua and barbuda.

What the colours stand for

The government’s list is short: the seven-point golden sun is the dawn of a new era; red is the lifeblood of slave forefathers and the dynamism of the people; blue is hope; black is the soil and African heritage; gold, blue and white together are the country’s attractions for visitors, sun, sea and sand; and the V stands for “victory at last”.

The encyclopedia adds a reading the government’s list doesn’t give: the seven rays of the sun are Antigua’s six parishes, and the seventh is Barbuda.

In July 2025 the historian Alister Thomas, a friend of Samuel’s, gave the Antigua Observer a longer version. Red is the lifeblood of the ancestors, the enslaved, their descendants and the people of Antigua and Barbuda; blue is the ocean and the Atlantic passage the enslaved endured; black is the African heritage of the enslaved and their descendants, the soil, and the labour and blood of the ancestors. Samuel, Thomas said, holds that the flag stands for freedom, emancipation and independence “to a greater extent than the Constitution does”.

National Flag Day

Antigua and Barbuda kept National Flag Day on 2 July 2025, Samuel’s 91st birthday, the Antigua Observer reported. The Flag Chronicle reported that Thomas began the push in 2024 to fix the day on 2 July, to match the designer’s birthday.

Telling it from Malawi’s flag

Malawi’s flag also has a rising sun on black, but Store norske leksikon describes it as a red half sun on the top stripe of three equal horizontal stripes, black, red and green. Antigua and Barbuda’s sun is gold, it sits on a black stripe inside a V, and the rest of the flag is red.