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Daybreak
Emancipation Day
Emancipation Day is 5 May, and I’m here with Ventisha Conolly from the Ministry of Youth, Sports and Heritage. Ventisha is responsible for planning all ministry events, including the 2025 Emancipation Day commemoration.
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Cayman Compass
‘Slavery be dead, we be free’ – The amazing true story of emancipation in Cayman
As Cayman celebrates Emancipation Day for the first time in over half a century, the Cayman Compass takes a detailed look at how a century of slavery came to a dramatic end on these islands.
‘Absolutely and unconditionally free’
On the morning of 3 May 1835, clad in the scarlet livery of the British West India Regiment, Captain Anthony Pack stood on a low wall overlooking Hog Sty Bay and read the proclamation that would change Cayman forever.
Lest the message of the legal document be unclear, the Governor of Jamaica, Lord Sligo, was there in person to spell it out.
“You who have been slaves and lately acting as apprentices, are by this decision made absolutely and unconditionally free,” he told the assembled crowd.
And with those words, Cayman’s formerly enslaved population became one of the first truly liberated black communities in the Caribbean.
