Just four kilometres from Senegal’s biggest port of Dakar, a visit to the Atlantic Ocean Island of Goree is like a pilgrimage. History surrounds you.
By boat it’s just fifteen minutes on a route decorated by similar tourist boats and fishermen canoes. When the island of Goree appears on the horizon, it is like a flat plain on one side and a hill on the other.
My hired guide, Aladji Ndiaye Dit Giande, smiled when I asked about his long name and said simply that a Senegalese must have four names.
As we descend into a sea of tourists and locals hawking jewellery and art crafts, Giande tells me that Goree Island is the first place where Europeans landed on the African continent. It is the furthest point into the Ocean and has a deep harbour. That is why it became the largest slave-trading centre on the African continent after the Portuguese started the trade in 1536 - the story of the worst form of exploitation of the African people ever.
Giande has mastered even the tiniest bits of the island’s history because he was born on the island as were his parents. Giande’s ancestors belong to the local tribes that occupied the island, mainly fishing communities, before the slave traders came.
Today, Goree Island offers a glimpse into the world’s dark history.
It is estimated that more than 20 million African men, women and children most of them from West Africa were held on this island before being shipped to the Americas and Europe. In fact, Giande’s great-great-great grand parents were among the many that survived being shipped off to unknown lands in America before slave trade was abolished in 1848.
Giande tells me all this as we walk from one small cell to another; he recites the history clearly as if it happened yesterday. As we walk uphill, through the small European-like alleys on the island, it’s impossible not to marvel at his immense knowledge about his homeland.
He says he started working as a tour guide on Goree Island as a youth and has learnt English from the islands’ many tourists. Walking through Goree’s narrow streets, the marks of slavery are still visible even 161 years after the last slaves were trafficked through this harbour.
The Island was first taken by the Portuguese in1444 and later the Dutch in 1588 who supposedly bought it from a local chief. It derives its name from the Dutch word “Goode Reede” meaning good harbour.
Giande shows me the many slave houses; warehouses where about 30 men, chained and shackled were put in an 8-square-foot cell with only a small window.
Some had a “punishment chamber”; a tinier cubicle where many Africans were locked up with their lower body under water. Former South African president and anti-apartheid icon Nelson Mandela actually crawled into one of these cells. The cell is not even a metre high, and about three metres long, yet the slave dealers forced about 20 people to stay there for days.
There writings on the walls which date as far back as the 14th century in the waiting rooms where people were weighed are still visible. One had to weigh over 60 kgs because to be shipped you had be very strong.
In one of the rooms, the mark 60 kgs is still on the wall. Many women and men were chained and fed for months to gain weight. Those who failed were thrown into the sea. The black iron shackles, the five-kilogram balls that were tied to the captives’ feet or necks, and the captors guns are in the slave house museum with other items used by slave traders.
But what is more heart wrenching are the slave cells for infants. Then Giande leads me into a dark corridor leading to a small door and the most beautiful view of the Atlantic. But it was never beautiful for the millions of Africans that went through it forcefully: It was the “Door of No Return” for every slave.
This is the door where many, including world leaders, have stood wondering how such inhuman trade could be allowed to go on for over 300 years. In1981, a former French prime minister, Michel Rocard while standing at the door said, “It is not easy for a white man, in all honesty, to visit this Slave House without feeling ill-at-ease.”
Then in 1992, Pope John Paul II visited and apologised to Africans for Catholic missionaries who engaged and benefited from the slavery of Africans. We visit Goree’s Catholic Church which dates to the slave days.
“This church was for rich white slave dealers,” Giande tells me, “Not even an African chief of the rich collaborators could sit there. They had to observe the mass from the yard.”
One of the significant icons on the island is the Slavery Freedom Monument of a black man and woman standing with their shackles broken. Brought from the Caribbean, the monument portrays the end of centuries of enslavement of black men and women.
Today’s Goree is vibrant tourist destination and has about 1,500 inhabitants. From atop the volcanic hill on the island, one gets the perfect view of the island that is ironically shaped like Africa.
Goree has been a UNESCO world heritage site since September 1978. Though Goree is a memorial to all Black people, it tells a touching story for anyone who cares about humanity.
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written by Gafabusa, April 20, 2009
The type of Museveni and Kagame are more than Slave hunters,, They are BUTCH
ERS..LONG LIVE AFRICA.. :evil: :evil: :evil: :evil:
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20 Million Africans over a period of 300years loosely translated accounts for 67,000 Africans lives sold into slavery every year.
In Today's Africa, how many African lives are lost from due to the general mismanagement of their affairs by their very own leaders?
67,000 is an under statement. you simply have to look at statistics from malaria,diarrhoea diseases-leave the rest including HIV/AIDs and you will see that from a "crude" extrapolation of figures, less Africans were lost from slavery t as compared to those two ailments whose control is very possible if we had gotten our politics right from day one of "politica independence"
Deal with it!!