Gorée Island, Senegal: The Doorway to the Transatlantic Slave Trade

ENDNOTES

Off the coast of Dakar Senegal, a small island sits out on the sea. This island looks peaceful, with its sandy beaches and the waves lapping the shore. However, the history of the island is quite the opposite. Gorée Island happens to be the most westward territory of the African continent. Gorée, although small in size played a key role in the transatlantic slave trade in the 1800s. The French noted the significant nature of the island, and in 1800, they claimed it for their own. The French interest was solely in opportunities in the slave trade. After the close of the slave trade the island faded into the background, however, Gorée has taken up more room in the press recently as some of the realities of this island’s history have come to light. As a slave-trading hub in the Atlantic world, this island represented a grim reality for many as the last piece of their home continent that they would ever see.

The place of nightmares for slaves was also the home of a number of free people. One individual who called Gorée home was Anne Pépin. Pépin was what was called a signare. This is the term that they used at the time for individuals who were of mixed African and European heritage.1 Pépin belonged to the noble class of Senegal. It is suspected that signare bloodlines were able to acquire social power because of the vital role that they played as go-betweens for the two cultures. The signare women were especially important to the economy of the island. French males that were stationed on the island took a particular interest in the women of Gorée. What was unique about the relationships between the French men and the Gorée women, compared to many other relationships in the transatlantic era, was that many of their relationships were a mutual arrangement. The men, being under the command of the French crown, were forbidden to engage in private business ventures. This meant that they were unable to be involved in the transatlantic slave trade for personal gain. However, these men’s wives were not bound by the same restrictions.2 Although it was still lust that led many to marriage, at least some of that lust was for economic gain. Pépin was one of these women, she had claimed the title as the ‘temporary’ wife, of the French commander and governor of Senegal.3

Map of Gorée Island, by Jean Baptiste Léonard Durand, Voyage au Sénégal (1802), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

After the governor moved on to other love interests, Pépin, used her knowledge of business to make a name for herself in the transatlantic slave trade. Slave trade companies such as Compagnie du Sénégal which operated within the area had been given exclusive rights to the slave trade from the region.4 This meant that the number of slaves that came from the area were suspected to account for nearly thirteen percent of the overall trade into the Americas.5 Naming her home and estate “Maison des Esclaves” (the House of Slaves), Pépin became a well-established individual in the trade. The role that the home actually played in the slave trade is something that, as we uncover more information regarding the number of slaves that passed through the home, has caused its role to be widely debated. Today, however, the number of slaves that passed through the walls of this structure is irrelevant. Instead, the home stands as a stark reminder of the atrocities that occurred during the era of the transatlantic slave trade.

This island and prison disguised as a home were the last parts of Africa that many men and women saw as they were loaded for transport to a life of brutal labor in the west Atlantic. On the lowest level of Pépin’s house, down the hall from the cells that held slaves, there is a door that faces towards the open ocean. This door had been infamously labeled as ‘the door of no return’. No one (that we know of) that walked through that door from the slave cells and onto a slave ship ever made it back to their homeland. The home on the island has been turned into a museum to symbolize the horrors of the slave trade. Although there is debate about the influence that this building itself had on the slave trade, it still stands as a reminder of the trade and the horrors that came with it for so many. It is now a museum that you can walk around and take in a small inkling of the emotions that so many must have felt, leaving their homeland a captive, setting out into the unknown.

Door of No Ruturn, Goree Island, Senegal, Toronto Star, Fair use.

The museum that now stands on Gorée Island was established back in 1962. Ever since then, the island has hosted thousands of individuals coming to the island to visit the site. Some come to better understand the history, others come to trace family ties. These visitors are both international and domestic, but they all leave impacted by a building that helps transform stories and history we know it by focusing on individuals who experienced being sold into slavery. The island has seen visitors such as the Obamas, Pope John Paul II, and others who have all come to learn and experience Gorée.6

Back in 2015, the International Coalition of Sites and Conscience announced that they would be working on revitalizing the museum. This project is set to finish at some point in 2022. This revitalization will include a multitude of projects. A big goal of this project is to pinpoint the role of this house in the slave trade as well as to use it as a metaphor for what was happening all over the West coast of Africa at the time. In the modifications the International Coalition of Sites and Conscience is helping to bring about, the museum will be displaying artifacts such as maps, shackles, and chains that have all been unearthed on the island.7 This will help bring to life the realities that slaves on this island faced. The Coalition stated that they are going to “transform the site into an international hub for dialogue on slavery.”8 They are hoping that through their work, Gorée Island will provide a site to interpret transatlantic slavery.9 Their goal is to “turn memories into action”10 taking the stories of those who experienced history and using them to help write a new narrative of history. Sites such as the Maison des Esclaves help to tell an alternative narrative to traditional histories. Instead of viewing something such as the transatlantic trade through the lens of European expansion, sites like these provide a space to view transatlantic trade from the perspective of those who unwillingly made this form of commerce possible.

The Maison des Esclaves stands today as a museum that welcomes visits from tourists. If you do venture to the sandy shores of Gorée Island, you will see the infamous door of no return. You will stand with your back to the east, looking out into the blue of the Atlantic. Although a majority of the slaves that left the continent never stood directly where your feet might be, they would have experienced the same view. The leaving of everything that they knew, not by choice, but by force, and boarding a ship that had little more possibility than almost certain death. With so much uncertainty slaves were pushed forward towards the west, ripped from their home. As we continue to confront our shared history, we must not let the gruesome realities of this era escape us. For as many historians know and have studied, it is when we forget where we came from that we repeat our same mistakes.

Fiona Kroontje

International Studies major (International Political Economy track)