Gorée Island: Dakar, Senegal

Well my friends, I’m back in Madagascar after a month of traveling around the main continent. And after having been across most of Africa now, I can tell you with absolute certainty that Africa is an incredibly diverse continent with more languages, peoples, and cultures than I can count. Each country is so very different, and when my plane arrived in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia for my stopover, I was struck with a severe culture shock. Madagascar is truly unique and not much like the rest of Africa. That being said, over the next few weeks, I will be sharing with you my experiences across the continent. Mind you, I promise you that I was traveling for work. Although there were plenty of fun times and opportunities, my primary objective was to collect information for a project I’m working on that will hopefully make the Fulbright ETA program more uniform and successful in the future across the sub-Saharan region.

Anyways, my first destination after a quick stop in Ethiopia where I really only saw the city between the airport and my hotel, was Dakar, Senegal. To give you some background information, Senegal is a country in West Africa. In fact, Dakar, the capital of Senegal, lies on a tiny peninsula which is the most western point of the main continent, barring small islands that aren’t connected. The distance from Addis Ababa to Dakar is about 140% longer than it is from New York to LA, which means I literally traversed across the entire continent, a distance greater than the span of the entire United States and some more. This hopefully gives you a better idea of exactly how big Africa is.

The purpose of my time in Dakar was a Fulbright ETA seminar hosted by the West African Research Center (WARC). There are a total of 47 Fulbright ETAs across the sub-Saharan continent, and the leadership/mentor team of 4 (which includes yours truly) helped organize the content and flow of our program for the week. I won’t bore you with the details of the seminar. People said things, experiences were shared, contacts exchanged, laughs were had, normal seminar stuff. What I really wanted to share with you was my afternoon on Gorée island, probably the most historically famous island when it comes to the exportation of west African people during the Atlantic slave trade. I should warn you now that there will be some pretty horrific details from this point forward. And I confess that I get a little preachy at the end.

Let me give you some numbers and statistics to put things in perspective. The Transatlantic Slave Trade (TST) lasted between 1525 and 1866 where an estimated 12.5 million Africans from West Africa (the Niger basin) and Central West Africa (the Congo basin) were captured by rival tribes and sold to Europeans who then shipped their human cargo to North America, the Caribbean, and South America. About 80% of these passengers were transported between the years 1700 and 1850, estimating about 80,000 people per year during this period. Of the 12.5 million that were exported (which does not include the number of those who were only captured, only those who were sent off) about 10.7 million actually made it to their final destinations. Of those who survived what they call the middle passage, 4.5 million were unloaded in the Caribbean, 3.2 million to modern day Brazil, and about 300,000 in what is the United States today.

The purpose of the TST was to provide labor for plantations in the Americas where cash crops like cotton (which only became big after the invention of cotton gin in 1793), tobacco (which was a pretty useless plant because it depletes the soil of vital nutrients), and, most importantly, sugar. It was in the Caribbean and Brazil where sugar was most common and also where the death rates were extremely high, making it necessary to import larger numbers of slave laborers from Africa because it was cheaper than improving the living conditions. It was actually in the United States where living conditions were, albeit horrible and evil, of a certain level such that the slave population naturally increased without the constant import of new slaves from Africa.

The people sent from Africa to the Americas were often prisoners of inter-tribal conflicts. The tour guide of the Gorée slave house explained to us that the tribal chieftains during the period of the TST were essentially forced to participate in the slave trade because of context and circumstances. Europeans would sell them weapons, gold, and other manufactured goods. In return, the tribe had to bring in a quota of captured slaves to be exported to the Americas. If the chieftain refused, the Europeans would simply move on to the next tribe and offer them the same deal. If the first chieftain refused, then he ran the risk that his people would be enslaved and sold off by a neighboring rival. And so local chieftains were left with two options, to enslave their neighbors or to be enslaved by their neighbors.

But capturing and exporting literally millions of human beings is hard, dirty, and gruesome work. Consequently, slave speculators typically built their slave houses and residences offshore, especially on tiny islands where captured prisoners would be brought, processed, held, and eventually exported. And that’s the history of Gorée island, a small island off the coast of Dakar that had changed hands between the Dutch, Portuguese, and French several times. Today the island is inhabited by fishermen and souvenir sellers. There is only one remaining slave house where they bring guests to see just one example of what used to be dozens of slave houses across the island.

Before I continue, I need to explain something that is important in understanding the context of my interpretation of my visit to Gorée island. I believe that in this world there are what we call thin and thick spaces. Thin spaces are those places where heaven and earth seem to meet in an almost mystical way. Thin spaces are characterized by peace and harmony. They are the kinds of places where people go and they say, “There is something about this place. I just feel so at peace and calm. It is as if God Himself had kissed the ground here and made it holy.” These are usually places of pilgrimages or holy sites where you cannot help but feel the presence of love, which often draws you to prayer and worship. Indeed, thin spaces are often created by intense and persistent prayer over a prolonged period, or by the presence of a truly holy individual who lived and worked in the place. Many of these places are churches or prayer gardens, places specifically designated and set apart for the worship and connection of the divine. But they can also be ordinary places. Some of my friends talk about one of the summer camps I worked at as a thin space. It is a place where peace reigns and you just feel right by being there.

On the other hand, there are places in this world that we call thick spaces. These are places where evil and sin have stained the earth. They are often places of mass atrocities or heinous crimes. Places where the sins of the past have literally seeped into the very ground. When people visit them, they feel the lingering presence of the evil that was committed in those places. Locations like Auschwitz, Dachau, Iwo Jima, the Coliseum, prisons, asylums, or certain parts of Gettysburg are examples of such places. Gorée island’s slave house is a thick space. It is a place where evil committed from human to human was so intense and prolonged that the spiritual remnants of these horrendous actions persist to this day. I’ve been to a few thick spaces before, and each time I make it a point not to take photos because the purpose of the visit is not to observe, but to experience. For this reason, I have no photos of the slave house as I find, for me at least, it inappropriate and dishonorable to turn the site of such atrocities into a purely touristic location.

Moving on, I will try to recount as much as I can about the slave house from what the tour guide explained to us. More or less, chieftains would lead slave raids on neighboring tribes and villages. They went to the villages with their new shinny weapons, obliterated any resistance, and captured entire populations, men, women, and children. From there, they would be brought to the slave houses where they would be processed, held, sold, and exported like cattle. I’ve been to a cattle market, as you recall. And the conditions of the cattle are better than the conditions of this or any slave house I know of. That may put things into some perspective.

The first thing they would do is separate the women from the men. Women were kept in their own holding cells and sold according to demand. Women and girls were also further divided between virgins and non-virgins. Virgins, usually young girls, were kept in their own cell which included a latrine pipe. No other cell had a latrine. In the back of this cell, there are tiny windows where slave speculators could come, take a good look at the merchandise, and purchase the virginity of the girls being kept there. Once a girl’s virginity was taken from her, she would live with the other non-virgins unless she became pregnant. If she did become pregnant, she would bring the child to term outside the slave house and the child would be born a freed person. In fact, most of the owners of the slave houses were the mixed children of slave speculators and young virgin girls captured during tribal raids. Children captured in the raids would remain with the women until they became of age. At that point, children were purposely separated from their parents and were purposely exported on different ships. Of age, in this case, was between 9 and 11 years old. However, because there were no birth records, the actual ages were speculated and simply judged. As our tour guide explained, age didn’t matter. It was all about the weight.

The men (which included boys under the age of 12) were weighed as soon as they arrived at the slave house. My memory is foggy, and I can’t seem to find it anywhere, but the golden weight for a slave was 46-47kg, or about 104lbs., if my memory serves me well. If the captured man or boy weighted this amount, regardless of other talents or skills, they could be sold across the Atlantic. Some captured men did have trade skills, which sometimes led them to have only slightly better living conditions, if they could produce the skill consistently. After being weighed and making the benchmark of 104lbs. the men and boys would be chained to the walls by their ankles, wrists, and neck. They were chained so closely to the wall that they could not sit, only stand. They were packed tightly and only had a small cutlet in the wall that provided a shred of sunlight. They were fed once a day and were given a short period to relieve themselves. Otherwise, and more often, they would defecate on the floor where they stood. These were the living conditions until slave ships arrived for sale and export.

If the man or boy did not meet the weight requirement, they would be kept in what they called the feeding chamber. There, the underweight were force fed three times a day a series of rice and beans over a month-long period in order to get them above that golden 104lbs. After the month of force feeding, they would be weighed again. If they were over the minimum weight, they would join the others on the walls of the tiny cells. Otherwise, they would be sent off to another location where they would be trained as house slaves.

Those slaves who acted up or were defiant were beaten publicly in the slave house’s yard before being stored in the punishment chamber, a small cell built in such a way that you can neither stand nor sit, but must remain crouching. They would leave them there for however long they believed was necessary, days or weeks. If the troublemakers persisted, they were publicly beaten again before being tied up, placed in a bag, and being thrown into the ocean to drown, all in front of the other slaves being held captive. Those captured men and women who died of natural causes or infection from their living conditions were also tossed in the ocean. They say that the sharks off the coast of Dakar have a long-ingrained taste for human flesh and blood that has become part of their biology. It is no wonder why. When I asked about the death rate, about 20-30% of the men and women captured, if I remember correctly, ultimately died while in confinement.

Eventually, slave ships would arrive off the coast of the island. All the slaves being sold would be chained together with a guard on either end of the line. They would be brought to a dark hallway with a single door just wide enough for one person to pass through. The door is named “the Door of no Return.” One slave would pass through the door at a time. There is a steep drop off such that you have to watch your step or risk tripping and falling face first. From the door, the slaves would walk single file across a long ramp that was connected to the slave ship on the other end where they would be detained for the duration of the Atlantic voyage. The reason to keep the slaves chained together was to prevent any individual slave from committing suicide by jumping into the rough waters and rocks below. The guards were there with guns ready to kill any slave thinking of jumping, which seems counterproductive because the slave is already trying to commit suicide. However, if the slave were shot instead of jumping off, it would prevent him from dragging the other slaves with him. Slave traders are crafty.

From there, many would die on the voyage and those who survived wish they would have died. The survivors, depending on their chances, found themselves either on sugar plantations in the Caribbean or Brazil (the worst option but also the most likely at 90%), or the tobacco and cotton plantations in the American South (the lesser of two evils but unlikely at 6%). The rest of the percentages included some Central American locations or, only if a slave had a truly unique skill set, Europe.

And that is the history of Gorée island. Mind you, the tour guide was very clear that the slave house we visited, which was one of dozens across the island at some point, was the most efficiently run export sites of slaves on the island. This means that there were dozens of other houses where captured men, women, and children were treated with even less dignity than I described here. The tour guide also made it a point that the TST was not the only slave trade to exist in Africa. In fact, the Indian Ocean slave trade, or the East African Slave Trade (EAST), carried out by the Arabs and Ottomans lasted from 800 all the way until 1873 and saw a conservative estimate of 17 million Africans exported to parts of North Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and other parts of the Indian Ocean. By comparison, the TST lasted (when rounded up) 350 years and averaged 30,000 slaves exported per year (with more historical accuracy and bookkeeping methods). On the other hand, the EAST lasted (rounded up) 1,100 years (750 longer by total) and estimated (with conservative export estimates and dodgy bookkeeping methods) an average of 15,000 slaves exported per year. Zanzibar, you know, that island off the coast of Tanzania which is well-known for its white sandy beaches and luxury, was the primary port used to move slaves from Africa along the EAST. In fact, the reason why it remained independent for so long was from its money, historically earned through slave trading.

Our tour guide also asked us why it is that there are African Americans today and why there are parts of Caribbean and South America with black populations whereas there are hardly any black Africans in places like North Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, or the Indian Ocean. He explained to us that the slaves of the EAST were treated far worse than those of the TST, which is hard to imagine. The men were castrated and women had their genitals mutilated so they could not become pregnant easily. Pregnant women often had their children killed or aborted on the command of their owner. Consequently, the EAST needed a continuous supply of slaves in order to maintain their population unlike in the American South where living conditions were good enough for slaves to have children, who were then sold to other plantation owners.

As I said before, the slave house on Gorée island is a thick space. As I walked through the house, placed my hands on the marks on the wall, stood in the darkness of the cells, and peered out the door of no return, I could not help but feel the weight of the evil that was committed in that place. I tried imagining what our tour guide was telling us. I tried to imagine the men and boys chained to the walls and defecating on the floor. I tried to imagine the troublemaker slaves being beaten in the courtyard and stuffed into the tiny punishment chambers. I tried to imagine the thoughts of one of the slave speculators peering through the tiny windows to see which girl’s virginity would be best and how the price negotiations would proceed. I tried to imagine the poor men and boys being force fed day after day so they would make the weight minimum. I tried to imagine children being taken from their parents and left with others until they were the proper weight, not even the proper age. I tried to imagine the dead being tied up and tossed into the sea, sharks circling about until the body landed where they could have their frenzy. I tried to imagine those being lined up, peering out the door where, once they stepped foot over it, would be the last sight of their homeland they would ever have. And as I tried to imagine these things, my heart became heavy and my mind went to dark places. But I also knew that I would never be able to truly grasp or understand the severity or the magnitude of the atrocities committed in the place where I was then standing.

It is said that when one sins, there are four corresponding consequences or fractures; a fracture with God, a fracture with oneself, a fracture with society, and a fracture with the cosmos; that each of our sins ripples throughout all creation and causes a disturbance in the order and harmony of God’s creation. Those ripples, when concentrated in a single place for such a prolonged time, cause a place to become thick, a place where it is difficult to feel the presence of God, not because He is not there, but because humanity chose to block Him out and shun Him from our hearts. These thick spaces are for us a reminder of the horrors that man is capable of committing against fellow man. They remain for us examples of what happens when we ignore and reject the dignity of other human persons, each created in the image and likeness of God. And for what? Profit? A power trip? An idolized vision of one society?

We modern people find these reasons to be absurd, things of the past and a bygone era where strange folklore and romanticized visions of race, nation, and religion ruled. But those ideas haven’t really changed, at least not the core of the ideas anyways. We still worship ourselves. We still idolize our self-images. We think we know better. That others have it wrong. That we are always on the right side of history. The only difference that I can see is how pride, vanity, and self-worship are manifested. Profit? Humans are still greedy whether they exploit through slavery or through other means. Power trip? Humans still try to control one another by controlling what is acceptable and not acceptable. Idolized vision of society? Humans still imagine utopic societies that ignore the reality that others think differently and desire differently.

There is a passage I copied once from a writer I can’t seem to find anymore; “Everyone worships something, even if that something is the belief that one can worship nothing. Each person, consciously or subconsciously, subscribes to a cosmology of hierarchical goods and ends. For many of us, the individual person, that is, the ‘self’, sits enthroned at the top of this hierarchy. Even the adherence to a group identity or tribe is often a form of self-worship, a projection of one’s ego on the external world that coincidentally and temporarily harmonizes with the similar egos of others. When the egos of a tribe cease to harmonize or find no external threat that forces them to ignore temporarily arbitrary divergencies, the tribe fractures and dissolves along the lines of those divergences. Theoretically, this process would continue util the ego of the self is utterly alone in the world. Although the case that there is only one man on earth is near impossible, the logical end of this harmonization of egos followed by fractures of tribes when faced with no immediate exterior threats suggests that unless man seeks to imitate something higher than himself and outside of himself, the subjective meaning and identity of the individual is just that; the ego imposing its subjective perception of itself on the world in a search for validation and vindication from others. In other words, it is seeking idolatry and worship, acts which are historically reserved for a higher power; that is, for God and gods.”

I don’t fully agree with the above nor do I think its logic is totally sound or valid, but I do believe that self-worship and self-idolization pushes man to do some pretty atrocious things. The slave house on Gorée island is reminder of the types of systems and societies that can form when one places himself or one’s own society in the position of God and the rest of the world below. It’s what happens when we believe ourselves above all other moral authority and can dictate who is human and who is not. It’s what happens when the ego of individuals and societies force their twisted and disordered wills on others instead of searching for the real truth out there in the world. I don’t think anyone will ever truly understand exactly what happened on Gorée island and to millions of men, women, and children torn from their homeland. And as for me, sin is sin regardless of the age. It is sin that creates thick spaces. It was sin that made Gorée island what it was and is. It is the sin of man that brings about evil is this world. And for sin to exist, there must be someone to commit it. Let us all learn from these places. If we don’t, human nature is bound to return to old ways. Humans, my dear friends, are horribly unoriginal.

As always, know that you are in my prayers each morning. All I ask is that you do the same for me.

May God be praised. May God have mercy.