Opinion

On Emancipation Day, the Government Reached for “Victoria Park”

The colonial name was retired in 2025. Its return is part of a longer pattern.

By Lance Davis, Editor · Vincypowa News · 2 August 2026

When the nation gathered to mark Emancipation Day, the government held the celebration at the venue it insists on calling Victoria Park, sidestepping the official name, Independence Park.

The park carries Queen Victoria’s name for reasons that have nothing to do with St Vincent and the Grenadines. It was dedicated in 1887 to mark her Golden Jubilee, a celebration of empire, and she never set foot on these islands. The name is a colonial inheritance. That is precisely why, in October 2025, the state retired it and proclaimed the venue Independence Park, a name tied to the raising of our flag in 1979.

This is not the first time the party now in office has come down on the side of the colonial form over the Vincentian one. In 2009, after a seven-year, consultation-driven reform process, the country was asked to replace the Independence Constitution the British Parliament handed down in 1979 with a homegrown one. The proposed constitution would have made St Vincent and the Grenadines a republic, removing the British monarch as head of state, and would have replaced appeals to the London-based Privy Council with the Caribbean Court of Justice. The New Democratic Party, then in opposition, led the campaign for a No vote.

The proposal was defeated. It won only about 43 percent support, far short of the two-thirds required. The result belonged to the electorate, not to any single party, and the No side raised real objections to specific clauses, from the death penalty provisions to the balance of rights in the draft. But the effect was plain: the country kept the constitution it inherited at independence, and kept the Queen at its head.

Parnel Campbell QC, who chaired the Constitution Reform Commission and had himself served as an NDP attorney general, later called that outcome a rejection of emancipation, and asked what reverence Emancipation Day could command from a people who, offered the chance to shed colonialism, turned it down. He fell out with his own party over its role in the No campaign.

On the constitution in 2009 and on the park in 2025, the party has more than once landed on the side that keeps the colonial form.

One can read too much into a single name on a single day. But the through-line is hard to miss. People can disagree with the 2025 renaming, as reasonable Vincentians did. But if the name is to be undone, it belongs in the open, through the same public decision that produced it, not through a quiet drift back to the colonial name as though the change never happened. To date the government has neither explained the choice nor confirmed whether it has formally reverted the name. It should do both.

Emancipation Day is about remembering the struggle against slavery, celebrating freedom, and honouring those who fought for the dignity of African people. To reach, on that day of all days, for the name of a 19th-century British monarch over the name that speaks to our own independence is to send a message. Many have heard it clearly.

History matters. Symbols matter. Words matter. On Emancipation Day more than any other day, they matter even more.

This is an opinion column and reflects the editorial view of Vincypowa News. The Government of St Vincent and the Grenadines is welcome to a right of reply, which we will publish in full.