The Governor Peter Beckingham described the account by a slave on Grand Turk, Mary Prince, as one of the most significant events involving Turks and Caicos, in his address at the Emancipation day service at St. Thomas Church, Grand Turk on Monday 1 August.
The Governor stated: “Mary Prince’s description of her shocking treatment on Grand Turk for nearly ten years as a salt worker, had a major impact on attempts to ban slavery in the UK, Europe and the United States. Her account repays rereading for its moving impact and descriptions of what was one of the worse crimes committed against human beings.
“But sadly, despite the end of slavery from Africa to the Americas, the world still permits an horrendous amount of “Modern Day Slavery” across numerous countries and continents” the Governor continued. “There are estimates that there are still as many as 45M people affected by one sort of slavery or another, ranging from the sea industry, where thousands of workers are impelled to work in dreadful conditions, especially in Asia, to the sex exploitation industry, common in hundreds of countries, and awful practice of forced begging, especially among children, which I have certainly witnessed firsthand.
“Regrettably, the UK is still not immune from some of these practices” , the Governor said “and our new Prime Minister Theresa May announced this weekend a new campaign to dry and drive out modern day slavery from Britain, where there are estimates of over 10,000 people affected. These are people working in brothels, on construction sites, nail bars, cannabis farms and in agriculture.
The Governor concluded: “TCI has of course a far smaller population, but I hope that anyone who has any concerns about modern day slavery here will alert the Human Rights Commission or the Police Force. It would be an injustice to Mary Prince to allow her memory to be scarred by the continuation of practices outlawed over 200 years ago.”
The Governor ended by reading a passage from Mary Prince’s book, which he said he had first read in Bermuda earlier this year: of her slave master she says: “nothing could touch his hard heart – neither sighs, nor tears, nor prayers, nor streaming blood: he was deaf to our cries, and careless of our sufferings.”
