Grenada Attorney Jailed After Opposing Slave Reenactment

Jerry Edwin, a Grenadian attorney who wrote a widely-read essay criticizing a slave reenactment event on a sugar plantation, was arrested by police Thursday when he attempted to disrupt the event.

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The slave reenactment, hosted by Grenada's Ministry of Tourism and sponsored by the National Heritage Committee, was advertised as being an important part of the island's history. It was also billed as falling in line with the global United Nations theme of cultural heritage and sustainable tourism development.

Moreover, the aim of the reenactment was to imitate the arrival and life of enslaved Africans in order to instill in the nation's children a “better understanding of the way the slaves lived on the various estates in Grenada,” according to a press release promoting the event.

Edwin's essay, however, blasted the event as a gross insult to the victims of slavery.

“It is very difficult to accept that not a single person on the National Heritage Committee realizes that genocide is not reenacted,” Edwin said in his essay.

“The victims do not imitate the tragedy. Slavery was not an event. This was a crime against humanity.”

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While Grenada's Prime Minister, Dr. Keith Mitchell, agreed with Edwin's opposition to the event, the nation's minister of culture, Brenda Hood, was supportive of the reenactment and attended it, Caribbean News Now reported.

Speaking about the event, Mitchell said, “Those who have initiated this reenactment need to look at it again because it is clearly something we should not be promoting.”

Hood, however, praised police officers who arrested Edwin as he attempted to barge in on the event. The owner of the 200-year-old distillery where the reenactment was staged was also supportive of Edwin's arrest and removal from the premises.

Grenada was a founding member of the Caribbean Reparations Commission in 2013. This is a regional organization of 12 nations created to establish the moral, ethical and legal case for the payment of reparations by the governments of all former colonial powers.

The organization argues that colonial crimes against humanity — Indigenous genocide, the Transatlantic Slave Trade and chattel slavery — didn't come to an end with the abolishment of slavery and continue to haunt Caribbean nations.