by Linda Straker
- 50th Independence anniversary will be on 7 February 2024
- Launch of 50th Independence celebrations to be 19 October 2023
- 19 October was day Maurice Bishop and others were killed on Fort Rupert (now Fort George)
One month before the date, Prime Minister Dickon Mitchell announced that 19 October 2023 will be declared a public holiday, and this year the day will be used to commence activities for the 50th Independence anniversary celebration, which will be observed on 7 February 2024.
“The launch of the 50th Independence celebrations on 19 October is no accident. The 19th of October is a significant, if not tragic, date in Grenada’s history, particularly over the last 40 years. The Cabinet will take the decision and give instructions that the necessary legal work is done to declare 19 October a national holiday, and the intent is to make that a permanent holiday,” the Prime Minister said in a news conference on Tuesday, 19 September 2023.
This means that there will be 2 holidays during the month of October: 19 October, the day Maurice Bishop and others were killed on Fort Rupert (now Fort George), and 25 October, the date labelled as Thanksgiving Day to commemorate the US Invasion which led to the restoring of democracy and the constitution following the fall of the Revolution.
Head of the 50th Independence Anniversary Committee Dr Wendy Crawford told the news conference, which was broadcast live on television and on social media platforms, that the activity will form part of the country’s 50th anniversary of political independence.
“Since independence is such an historic event for us, a period when we are given a time to tell our history. What better time could we ask for when the nation will be attentive to not only the celebration of our independence… and 19 October is a story that everybody has told, has written about, spoken about established the narrative, and all of that came externally,” she said.
Prime Minister Dickon Mitchell defended the decision to launch on the 40th anniversary of the Fort Rupert event, coinciding with the independence celebrations, by saying 19 October is “merely the launch of the commencement of the activities to commemorate the 50th anniversary.
“I am using the word commemorate because I think too often people assume a public holiday means a festive or celebratory event. In fact, and that’s the point I wish to make here, our perspective of marking 19 October as a public holiday is, in fact, for us to recognise the sombre nature, the tragic nature of what happened, and for us to reflect upon it and understand why it happened.”
“It is important for us to mark that occasion in a sombre manner, in a reflective manner and perhaps even in an emotional manner, so we understand when we say, for example, that we are a democratic society that we value democracy, we value freedom of speech… that those things actually mean something because the opposite of it would have been what happened on 19 October in a very tragic manner,” he said.