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By Root 475 0

Anne Pépin was the mistress of the chevalier de Boufflers, the island’s French governor. She visited him resplendent with jewels and received his guests in lavish European style. For her, he constructed the house that became La Maison des Esclaves. The signares kept European-style households and developed a sumptuous fusion cuisine. The dishes they created for entertaining were designed to impress their French patrons and European guests. One example is the culinary tour de force dem farci: fish that is skinned, boned, stuffed with a forcemeat of fish and bread, reconstituted, cooked, and served whole. Their hospitality was as legendary as their beauty and their avidity, and the descendants of the dishes that they served to their French “husbands” are reputed to be some of Senegal’s most sophisticated even today.

Goreé Island, which flourished under the French in the eighteenth century, was only one such place along the western coast of Africa where millions of Africans were sent to embark on the harrowing journey to the Americas. As the trade grew, slave depots pockmarked the western coast from Gorée in the north to Luanda and Benguela in Angola in the south. They are etched in infamy, yet, ironically, names like Elmina, Cape Coast, Anécho, Ouidah, Calabar, Bonny, Loango, and Cabinda are largely unknown to the American descendants of those who passed through them. These were the last spots on the African continent on which millions stood in fear, not knowing what would befall them before being loaded onto longboats or canoes, transported to the big ships that sat at anchor, and carried in misery across the ocean to the American future that awaited them. Surely, as they looked back in horror at the coastline ebbing away, they thought of families and loved ones lost, of traditions shared, and of the homes they would see no more. Not all came to the North American colonies; of the Africans who arrived in the hemisphere, only 6 percent came to the continental United States. The others went to Latin America and the Caribbean, with the largest number going to Brazil. No matter where their journeys from Gorée and like spots took them, they brought with them a remembrance of the meals they had eaten on the African continent that transformed the tastes of their new homes.

Slavery existed in the world for centuries before it came to the shores of the Americas. We get our word slave from the Slavic peoples of middle Europe, who were captured and sold at the slave markets in Roman times along with prisoners of war from around the vast empire. Africans also knew slavery long before Europeans arrived on their shores. Enemies, criminals, and debtors all became slaves of those in power. An African slave trade to Europe that presaged the one to the Americas began as a trickle in 1441, when the Portuguese first brought sub-Saharan African slaves to European markets. Once Spain established its American settlements, Nicolás de Ovando, governor of Hispaniola, decreed that only black slaves born in Spain or Portugal could be imported into the colony. Eventually that ruling was abandoned, as those slaves incited the Indians to revolt. Yet, as the Spanish colonies grew in the New World, so did their need for slave labor, and regular slave traffic from Africa to the Americas began in 1519. Then, a century later, in 1619, a captured ship brought nineteen Africans who had been bound for enslavement in Cuba into the Jamestown Colony in Virginia. The original Africans were indentured and not enslaved, but they, like the millions of others who would follow them to the continental United States, had endured the Atlantic transit. They had survived the Middle Passage that was the birth canal of African Americans. It was a voyage that took Africans and transported them through moans, screams, pain, and wrenching separation into life on American shores.

The Middle Passage was the central leg of a complex triangular voyage that offered enormous profit to those whose ships successfully completed all three legs. In the early years, the journeys began in