Regional · Trinidad and Tobago
Emancipation Day Row Splits Trinidad as PM and Opposition Trade Accusations of Racism
Jeered for skipping the national Emancipation event, Kamla Persad-Bissessar has accused the PNM on Facebook of stoking anti-Indian hatred and of abusing two Afro-Trinidadian figures. Opposition Leader Pennelope Beckles has hit back, branding it hate speech and telling the prime minister to step aside.
A dispute over Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar’s absence from Trinidad and Tobago’s main African Emancipation Day event has escalated into an open racial and political row, with the prime minister and the opposition leader accusing each other of racism and disrespect on a holiday meant for national unity.
Persad-Bissessar had been listed to address the Lidj Yasu Omowale Emancipation Village at Queen’s Park Savannah on Saturday. After a delay, the Emancipation Support Committee’s director, Dr Asha Kambon, told the crowd the prime minister could no longer attend, and sections of the audience jeered. Persad-Bissessar said she never committed to attending, had taken part in two emancipation events on Thursday, and was spending the holiday with her family, and she accused PNM MPs and supporters of an “irrational hatred” that she said was leaving them “deranged.”
Much of the friction traces to a separate Emancipation event hosted by the University of Trinidad and Tobago that featured a tassa performance and classical Indian dance, which drew debate online over whether Indian cultural acts were appropriate at a commemoration of the emancipation of enslaved Africans. Asked about it, the prime minister said that if PNM supporters did not want East Indians taking part in Emancipation events, that was their democratic choice, and pointedly suggested the party invite two businesswomen, Star Sabga and Jenna Hadeed, to perform. UTT’s executive chairman, Prof Selwyn Cudjoe, declined to comment.
In a post on her verified Facebook page on Saturday, the prime minister went further. She accused “PNM MPs and owners” of treating the destruction of Afro-Trinidadians who support the UNC, and the spreading of “coolie hatred,” a slur directed at people of Indian descent, as sound political strategy. She called the party under Beckles its most “hateful, racist and divisive” version, said Culture Minister Michelle Benjamin and Cudjoe had been abused over the weekend, and claimed some PNM figures had contacted her overnight to distance themselves from the leadership. Benjamin, she said, was targeted not as a representative of the African community but as a proxy for the prime minister herself.
On a day set aside for unity, Trinidad’s two most senior politicians spent it accusing one another of racism.
Opposition Leader Pennelope Beckles had set off the exchange with a statement calling the prime minister’s absence disdainful and saying she should “do the honourable thing and step aside.” After the Facebook broadside, Beckles answered on her own page, likening the prime minister’s statement to David Rudder’s calypso “Rant of a Madman” and calling it “shameful hate speech on the occasion of Emancipation.” She described Persad-Bissessar as a desperate and failing leader lashing out at public dissatisfaction, said the PNM would not be drawn “into the political gutter,” and asked where the prime minister stood on reparations and on promises she made a year earlier at the same Emancipation Village. Beckles had also linked the Sabga and Hadeed remark to the women’s detention earlier this year, which she cast as a political vendetta, a charge the government rejects.
Former prime minister Keith Rowley, who led the PNM until 2025, has also rounded on Persad-Bissessar. Days earlier he had accused her of racial hypocrisy, recalling in a statement carried by Trinidadian media that she once called him “an Oreo in the service of the one per cent.” Over the weekend he escalated on his Facebook page, which carries his official biography and some 204,000 followers, mocking the prime minister’s claim of hurt by invoking Marie Antoinette and saying she was “out of control” and needed to stop. Rowley’s earlier attacks on the prime minister have themselves drawn condemnation, including from women’s organisations that called them sexist and demanded an apology.
Background: the detention case
Star Sabga and Dominic and Genevieve Hadeed were detained in June under preventive detention orders during Trinidad and Tobago’s state of emergency, in connection with an alleged plot to assassinate the prime minister. The Hadeeds were released without charge in July on a review tribunal’s recommendation, and the High Court later placed Sabga under house arrest pending a constitutional challenge. None of the three has been charged.
At the official Emancipation ceremony at Independence Square, Benjamin was booed after she referred to the prime minister during her remarks. Persad-Bissessar struck a calmer note at her own office’s celebration at the Diplomatic Centre, where she said she had been deeply hurt by recent racist attacks and by words rooted in racial prejudice, and warned that the country could not survive “the language of division.”
Trinidad and Tobago was the first country in the world to declare Emancipation Day a national holiday, in 1985, and marked the 188th anniversary of the abolition of slavery on Saturday. The president, the prime minister and the opposition leader each issued Emancipation messages calling for unity and reflection.
This article draws on statements posted to the Facebook pages of Prime Minister Persad-Bissessar, Opposition Leader Beckles and former prime minister Keith Rowley, and on reporting by Trinidadian media. The social-media statements are recent, and Vincypowa News could not confirm them with other outlets at the time of publication. Several assertions in them, including the prime minister’s claims about the conduct of PNM figures and the Emancipation Support Committee, are the speakers’ own.