Nutmeg, Revolution and an Invasion
The only country with a spice on its flag, once second only to Indonesia in nutmeg, until a hurricane destroyed ninety per cent of the trees in a night. Also the only English-speaking Caribbean state to have had a socialist revolution — and to have been invaded four years later.
The national flag of Grenada carries a nutmeg. Not a star, not a bird, not a mountain — a seed, drawn in cross-section, showing the red aril that wraps it and is sold separately as mace. No other country puts a spice on its flag, and none has had one matter as much.
For most of the twentieth century Grenada produced a substantial share of the world’s nutmeg, second only to Indonesia, from an island of 344 square kilometres. In September 2004 Hurricane Ivan crossed it directly and destroyed something in the order of ninety per cent of the trees. A nutmeg tree takes seven to nine years to bear and considerably longer to reach full production.
How a spice got here
Nutmeg is not from the Caribbean. It is native to the Banda Islands in eastern Indonesia, where the Dutch East India Company enforced a monopoly through the seventeenth century with a brutality that included the near-annihilation of the Bandanese population.
The monopoly was broken by transplantation — the British moved seedlings to their own colonies, and nutmeg reached Grenada in the 1840s. It found volcanic soil, high rainfall and altitude that suited it, and within a century the island was a major world producer.
What made Grenada unusual was the ownership structure. Nutmeg is grown here overwhelmingly by smallholders on plots of a few acres, often interplanted with cocoa and banana under shade, and marketed through the Grenada Cooperative Nutmeg Association — a producer cooperative established in the 1940s that handles processing and export on behalf of thousands of growers. It is a genuine agricultural cooperative of the kind that mostly failed elsewhere in the region, and it survived.
The processing station at Gouyave, which visitors can walk through, is one of the more purely enjoyable industrial visits in the Caribbean: nutmegs sorted by hand and by water — the ones that float are dried insufficiently and are separated — then graded, and the mace peeled off and dried on trays. It smells the way you would hope.
The revolution
Grenada is also the only country in the English-speaking Caribbean to have had a socialist revolution, and the sequence of events between 1979 and 1983 is compressed enough to be difficult to believe.
In March 1979 the New Jewel Movement, led by Maurice Bishop, took power in a nearly bloodless coup against Eric Gairy, whose rule had involved an armed irregular force known as the Mongoose Gang. The People’s Revolutionary Government suspended the constitution, aligned with Cuba and the Soviet Union, and pursued literacy, health and cooperative programmes that had genuine popular support alongside detentions of opponents and no elections.
Cuba supplied engineers to build a new international airport at Point Salines — presented by Grenada as essential tourism infrastructure and by Washington as a potential military runway. It is, today, the airport every visitor lands at, and it is named after Maurice Bishop.
In October 1983 the government split. Bishop was placed under house arrest by a faction of his own party, freed by a crowd, and then killed along with several colleagues at Fort Rupert — now Fort George, where the site is marked. Days later, on 25 October, the United States invaded with support from several eastern Caribbean states, in an operation that met resistance from Grenadian forces and Cuban construction workers and was over within a week.
The airport Washington called a military threat is the one every tourist now lands at, and it is named after the man the revolution killed.
The invasion was condemned by the UN General Assembly and by the British government of the day, and remains contested. Within Grenada, opinion is genuinely divided and openly discussed — many Grenadians describe it as an intervention that ended a crisis, others as an invasion of a sovereign state, and a substantial number hold both views at once. Constitutional government was restored in 1984.
Bishop’s remains have never been found. That fact sits under the whole conversation.
After Ivan
Hurricane Ivan in 2004 was the other rupture. It killed dozens, damaged the great majority of buildings, took the roof off the prison, and destroyed the nutmeg groves that were the rural economy.
Recovery has been long. Nutmeg production has come back but has not returned to pre-Ivan levels, and the cooperative has spent two decades replanting and diversifying — into cocoa in particular, where Grenada has moved up the value chain rather than merely replacing volume.
The Grenada Chocolate Company, founded in the 1990s, was one of the first tree-to-bar operations anywhere: growing organic cocoa, processing it on the island in a small solar-powered factory, and exporting finished chocolate rather than raw beans. The model has since been copied widely, and Grenadian chocolate now wins international awards on quality rather than novelty.
It is the counter-example to the whole Caribbean commodity story: instead of exporting a raw crop and importing the finished product at ten times the price, an island kept the processing. Whether that scales is a real question. That it works at all is worth the visit to the factory at Hermitage.
The other spices, and the rum
Grenada is called the Spice Isle and the plural is earned. Alongside nutmeg and mace it grows cinnamon, cloves, ginger, turmeric, bay leaf and allspice, mostly on the same smallholdings and mostly interplanted under shade — which is an agroforestry system rather than a monoculture, and which is why the island’s hillsides look like forest rather than plantation.
The rum is worth a separate paragraph. River Antoine on the north-east coast has been distilling since 1785 and still runs its cane crusher off a waterwheel — one of the oldest functioning water-powered mills in the Caribbean. The rum comes off the still at a strength that airlines will not carry, and the distillery sells a diluted version specifically so visitors can take it home.
The process is entirely visible: cane cut in the fields outside, crushed by the wheel, fermented in open stone troughs with wild yeast, distilled in a pot still, and bottled by hand. There is no marketing overlay because there has never needed to be one.
Nearby, the Belmont Estate does the same for cocoa, and the two together make the strongest argument on the island for what small-scale, locally owned processing can hold onto that a raw-commodity export cannot.
The island itself
St George’s is generally rated the most attractive harbour town in the Caribbean, and it earns it: a horseshoe of a drowned volcanic crater with pastel warehouses stacked up the slope, forts above, and the Carenage running round the water.
Grand Anse is the famous beach — three kilometres of it, south of town. Underwater, the Molinere Bay sculpture park was the first of its kind in the world, an installation of concrete figures placed on the seabed in 2006 that has since colonised with coral and functions as an artificial reef drawing pressure off natural ones.
Inland, the Grand Etang crater lake sits in rainforest at 530 metres with a national park around it and mona monkeys that were brought from West Africa during the slave trade and never left. Concord and Seven Sisters falls are short walks; the Belmont Estate is a working cocoa plantation that does the whole chain in front of you.
And north across a channel are Carriacou and Petite Martinique — part of Grenada, quieter still, with a wooden boat-building tradition brought by Scottish shipwrights in the nineteenth century and maintained by families who still lay keels on the beach at Windward.
Sara shoots on assignment across four continents and develops half of it on film. Her long-term project on harvest seasons — coffee, saffron, olives, rice — has been exhibited at Visa pour l’Image in Perpignan.