Nelson Island, Trinidad and Tobago --Leaders from Reformed churches around the world have remembered the consequences of the transatlantic slave trade at a Trinidad island that was fortified using slave labor, and have vowed to challenge oppression.

"The agony of people in chains, being bought and sold and used to build the wealth of Europe and the Americas, still terrorises us today," Puleng LenkaBula, a theologian from the Lesotho Evangelical Church, who now teaches in South Africa, said in prayers at a commemoration event on Nelson Island, off Trinidad's west coast.

The ceremony took place near Port of Spain during an October 18-28 meeting of the executive committee of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches. WARC groups 75 million Reformed Christians in 214 church bodies, including the UCC, in 107 countries.

In 2004, delegates to the alliance's general council, or global assembly, in Accra, Ghana, visited slave dungeons at Elmina and Cape Coast, ports on the country's coast from which millions of slaves were shipped overseas as part of the transatlantic trade in human beings.

WARC described the October 24 commemoration on Nelson Island as marking a "sacred journey from slave sites in Africa to the Caribbean."

During the Nelson Island ceremony, the Rev. Collin Cowan from Jamaica recounted his experience of entering the Elmina dungeons in Ghana.

"In that moment, I felt the pain of my ancestors. I heard their cry," Cowan said. "The tears poured from my eyes. I felt anger, anger and hatred that I didn't know I was capable of."

British forces captured Trinidad from Spain in 1797, and proceeded to build fortifications on Nelson Island using African slave labour.

The WARC commemoration on the island included African music, drumming and a communion service, as well as reflections from descendants of victims of the slave trade.

"May the reflections and prayers of this sacred journey serve to release the burdens that the generations of the slaves carry with us today," said the Rev. Hazel Ann Gibbs DePeza of the Spiritual Baptist Church, a religious movement rooted in the experience of slaves brought to Trinidad.

The Reformed leaders acknowledged their complicity and that of their churches in slavery and racism, and pledged to challenge oppression. "Unless we allow our minds and memories and spirit to go back to those times, we will not be able to move on," said worship leader the Rev. Robina Winbush from the United States.

The WARC events on Nelson Island took place in the year that marks the 200th anniversary of Britain's passing of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act, which outlawed the slave trade throughout the British Empire and made it illegal for British ships to be involved in the trade. The act marked the beginning of the end for the transatlantic traffic in human beings. Other European nations, however, continued the trade and slavery itself did not come to an end in Trinidad until 1838.

After the end of slavery, Britain transported indentured labourers from India to work on the plantations of Trinidad and other Caribbean colonies. From 1865 to 1917, Nelson Island served as a processing centre for 101 000 Indian workers.

The island's fortifications were later used as a detention centre for leaders of insurrection movements in Trinidad and Tobago. This included the post-independence "February Revolution" of 1970, which was strongly influenced by the black power movement.

One of the leaders of that uprising, who was held on Nelson Island, recounted how Africa had been devastated by the slave trade.

"There is something that is missing and that is justice," said Khafra Kambon, chairperson of the Emancipation Support Committee of Trinidad and Tobago.

"The 400 years of the slave trade changed the world, and not for the better," said Kambon. "The focus has to be on justice. There will never be reconciliation until there is justice."

He was speaking after the Nelson Island commemoration, and at a meeting with world alliance representatives in Port of Spain's Laventille district, the site of one of the first settlements of freed African slaves.

WARC president, the Rev. Clifton Kirkpatrick from the Presbyterian Church (USA), said, "If our forebears could have been involved in something so brutal, so wicked, what could we be involved in today? We are convinced that never again should this enslavement happen to human beings."