A trip to Goree - Thoughts on Slavery

Yesterday we took the ferry to Goree island, once a holding place for slaves before they were sent across the Atlantic ocean. It is now a big tourist attraction, which feels a little strange given its history. The island itself, and the Mediterranean architecture of the buildings, were beautiful.  

 Me with my very own Baobab tree! A young and small one at about 70 years old. They can live to be about 1000. 

 These sand artists create these amazing pictures using sand from different parts of Senegal. Each color comes from a different location, and the black sand is volcanic. 

 My roommate Beth and I

Eventually, we visited the only remaining slave house on the island. The other houses have been converted to private residences. I’m not sure if I could live in a building once designed for such purposes, but I suppose it is the people, not the walls themselves, that create such evil. It is said that from 1536-1848, 15 to 20 million Africans left Goree island as slaves. The house had several rooms for men, a room for women, a room for young women, and a room for children.

”Often times in this very house, one could find a whole family:  father, mother, child separated. Their departure to the Americas depended on potential purchasers, the father would be going to Louisiana, the mother to Brazil or Cuba, and the child to Haiti or the West Indies.”

Imagine your own family, ripped away from you. Spending day after day in a suffocating hot room, chained to a wall, waiting only to be placed on a ship bound for a far worse fate. Imagine that room of children. No parents, no love, no compassion. Who could treat other human beings this way? As animals, who were literally bred to create offspring that would grow to be the strongest slaves. Yet the blame does not lie entirely with any one group of people. The demand was with the Americans, the trade with the Europeans, and the supply with the Africans. One of the most prominent features of the slave house, and an image I have become familiar with due to its popular appearance in Senegalese movies, is a door in the middle of the slave house that opens up to the ocean. This was the "door of no return", the door that slaves walked through only after they had been sold and were being boarded onto a ship. Slaves sometimes preferred death to this fate, and  would jump to their suicide rather than walk forward into such permanent loss of freedom. As our tour guide said, “Once you walked through that door, you lost your African name.”

It was an emotional place to stand, but we must be able to tell our own history. It is the history of Africa, of America, of the world. “Could America be American without the black people? America, after all, owes a good deal of its economic power and its present day standard of living to the oil of these blacks, so called ‘slaves.’” I think we often forget how significant African-Americans have been, at great personal cost, to the growth of our country. I don’t mean to suggest that this was a sacrificial act, but we need to appreciate the great contributions Africans have made to our country, our society, our culture. “The most obnoxious, effect of slavery is perhaps the persistence of the myth of the superiority or inferiority linked to the colour of one’s skin.” I do not believe that the color of a person’s skin has the power to dictate a single facet of their life. In fact, I find skin color to be a rather ridiculous notion in itself. Skin color varies so much - who decides what "category" you fall in?

I can't end this without at least making sure all of my readers know how prevalent slavery still is today. Modern day slavery is a greater industry than it ever has been, with an estimated 70 million slaves in existence around the world. Sex trafficking is one particularly disgusting form of this and an issue I am extremely passionate about. If you would like to learn more about this, I suggest www.love146.org, a very informative and all-around awesome website. "I can do no harm, nor allow harm to be done to another human being." You can't change the world, but you can lessen your personal impact. At least be aware.

All quotes (except that last one) from a brochure I bought on the island called "The Slave House of Goree-Island" by Joseph Boubacar Ndiaye. All pictures taken by me, except the one of the Door of No Return, taken from Wikipedia because I couldn't get a clear picture of it.