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| House of Slaves - Goree Island |
House of Slaves and its Door of No Return is a museum and memorial to the Atlantic Slave Trade on tiny Goree Island, 3 km off the coast of the city of Dakar, Senegal.It is said to memorialise the final exit point of slaves from Africa. Historians differ on how many, if any African slaves were actually held in this building, as well as the relative importance of Goree Island as a point on the Atlantic Slave Trade,but visitors from Africa, Europe and the Americas, along with world leaders, continue to make it an important place to remember the human toll of African slavery.
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| Door of no Return - Goree Isand |
Its museum, opened in 1962 and curated until his death in 2009 by Boubacar Joseph Ndiaye, who was a tireless advocate of both the memorial and the belief in that slaves were held in the building in great numbers and from here transported directly to the Americas. Eventually he becoming curator of the Museum, Ndiaye has claimed that more than a million slaves passed through the doors of the house. This belief has made the house both a tourist attraction, and the site for dozens of state visits by world leaders to Senegal.
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| Statue Des Esclaves - Goree Isand |
Since the 1980s, academics have downplayed the role that Goree played in the Atlantic Slave Trade. Ndiaye and other Senegalese have always maintained that the site is more than a memorial and is an actual historic site in the transport of Africans to French, Spanish, Dutch, and Portuguese colonies of the Americas.
Built around 1776, the building was the home in the early 19th century to one of a class wealthy colonial Senegalese Métis woman trader Anna Colas Pépin. Researchers argue that while the houseowner may have sold small numbers of slaves and kept a few domestic slaves, the actual point of departure was 300m away at a fort on the beach. The house has been restored since the 1970s.
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| Slave ship |
Academic accounts, such as the 1969 statistical work of historian Philip D. Curtin, argue that exports from Goree began around 1670 and continued until about 1810, at no time more than 200 to 300 a year in important years and none at all in others. Curtin's 1969 accounting of slave trade statistics records that between 1711 and 1810 180,000 enslaved Africans were transported from the French posts in Senegambia, most being transported from Saint-Louis, Senegal and James Fort in modern Gambia.
Even those who argue Goree was never important in the slave trade view the island as an important memorial to a trade that was carried on in greater scale from ports in modern Ghana and Benin.
Visit the Page for the Woman's Museum on Goree Island
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