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By Root 473 0

captives huddled in misery below them. He showed us the room where the women and young children were held, the stygian dungeons that housed the general population of men and boys, and the cramped lockups for the recalcitrant. He pointed out the open doorway to the rocks and sea and called it the Door of No Return. Ndiaye had a pair of iron shackles, which he put on, and as he hobbled around the courtyard, the realities of enslavement became vividly real. In 1972, before Alex Haley penned Roots and revised the way that many black Americans thought of their African ancestry, this was transformational. Certainly slavery was not a new concept, but actually standing on one of the spots where Africans had been forced on ships and sent off to the Americas was harrowing and unforgettable.

Gorée was no more than a shadow on the horizon for a few subsequent trips to Dakar until several years later, when I found myself compelled to go there again. By this time, Roots had transformed the place, and Ndiaye’s demonstration had become more studied, more theatrical, and to me, less moving. The walls were decorated with slips of paper inscribed with quotations from around the world about slavery and its horrors. The crowds were larger; the house, however, remained the same. On this solo journey, without the comfort of my mother or fellow black Americans, the spirit of the place overwhelmed me, and I, like many others before and after me, broke down and began weeping with despair and grief at the thought of history’s transgressions. I was in such a state that a newly made Senegalese friend, Yaya MBoup, took it upon herself to find me some African Americans who lived on the island and introduced me to John Franklin and Elaine Charles. That evening, I missed the last ferry from Gorée and spent the night amid new friends and the island’s ghosts, listening to the slap of sandals on the sandy lanes, savoring the fragrant chicken yassa that had been prepared. That night I began to learn the tale of Gorée and the Transatlantic Slave Trade.

In the fifteenth century, Gorée was settled by the Portuguese as a beachhead of incursion into the African continent. Subsequently, the Dutch, British, and French took over the island in turn and made it their base during their years of slave trading. The transportation and enslavement of millions of Africans and their descendants was not a clear-cut issue but rather the result of much complicity between Europeans and Africans, many of whom had lived together in relative harmony in the coastal areas of the continent for centuries. There, in places like Gorée, they had developed their own culture, one that was creolized and that mixed European and African ways with facility. Historian Ira Berlin has called these people Atlantic Creoles. Up and down the West African coast they created a buffer community between Europeans and Africans and often served as middlemen in the Transatlantic Slave Trade.

In their forays to the Senegalese coast, the French, like their predecessors, developed friendships with local natives and established liaisons with local women who were known as signares (from the Portuguese senhora). These women, with European names like Caty Louette, Victoria Albir, and Anne Pépin, were members of Gorée’s mulatto elite, which had developed from centuries of intermingling between Africans and Europeans. The signares bridged the worlds of Africa and Europe and evidenced the best and worst of each. Practiced courtesans, they dressed in European finery, contracted “local marriages” with powerful Europeans, headed their own businesses offering goods to provision ships, provided canoe men to transport the enslaved to the ships, made fortunes as slave traders, worked as go-betweens in the trade, and generally were complicit in the enslavement of many. They dominated the island and were its leading citizens. In 1767 Caty Louette had her own household slaves and owned one of the island’s first stone houses. Victoria Albir built the colonnaded domicile that today houses the island’s ethnographic museum, and