House of Slaves

Historical use

The building was constructed around 1776 by Nicolas Pépin, brother of the influential signare Anne Pépin. The House is more associated with Nicolas's daughter, Anna Colas Pépin, a signare who lived in the home in the early 19th century. Senegalese signares were wealthy, colonial women traders. The Pépin family owned several ships and participated in the slave trade, with the house being used as a holding center to export enslaved Africans.

Conditions in the building were harrowing, with many of the imprisoned perishing before they reached the ships. Captured enslaved people "were imprisoned in dark, airless cells", and "spent days shackled to the floor, their backs against the walls, unable to move." Families were separated both at the House, with men, women, and children being held in separate quarters, as well as after boarding the ships, since most of them were not sent to the same locations. Young girls, in particular, were held separately from the rest of the imprisoned, being "paraded in the courtyard so that the traders and enslavers could choose them for sex"; if they became pregnant, they were allowed to remain on the island until they gave birth.

Memorial

In 1962, the House of Slaves was reconstructed and opened as a museum, largely through the work of Boubacar Joseph Ndiaye (1922–2009). Ndiaye was an advocate of the belief that Gorée, and the House, was a significant keystone in the slave trade to the Americas. Eventually becoming curator of the Museum, Ndiaye claimed that more than a million enslaved people passed through the doors of the house. This belief has made the house both a tourist attraction and a site for state visits by world leaders to Senegal.

Academic controversy

Historians have argued that it is unlikely that many enslaved people actually walked through the Door, and that Gorée itself was marginal to the Atlantic slave trade.

Researchers argue that while the houseowner may have sold small numbers of enslaved people (kept in the now reconstructed basement cells) and kept a few domestic enslaved people, the actual point of departure was 300m away at a fort on the beach. Despite the purported significance of Gorée Island, some historians have made claim that only 26,000 enslaved Africans were recorded as having passed through the island, of total the unknown number of slaves that were exported from Africa. Ndiaye and supporters have submitted that there is evidence, the building itself, was originally built to hold a large number of enslaved people, and that as many as 15 million people passed through this particular Door of No Return.

Academic accounts, such as the 1969 statistical work of historian Philip D. Curtin, argue that enforced transports from Gorée 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 enforced 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. Curtin has been quoted as stating that the actual doorway memorialised likely had no historical significance, due to the fact that it was built in the late 1770s and "late in the era [of slave trading] to be of much importance", with Britain and the United States both abolishing the slave trade in 1807.

Other academics have also pointed out that Curtin did not account for the number of individuals who died during transport or shortly after their capture, which could have added significantly to his estimate. In response to these figures, popularly rejected by much of the Senegalese public, an African historical conference in 1998 claimed that records from the French trading houses of Nantes documented 103,000 slaves being from Gorée on Nantes-owned ships from 1763 to 1775. However, the evidence for this claim was a document that cited 103,000 enslaved Africans being taken from the larger region of Upper Guinea on the whole, not Gorée specifically. Ana Lucia Araujo has stated "it's not a real place from where real people left in the numbers they say".

Even those who argue Gorée 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.

Tourism

Despite the controversy, the Maison des Esclaves is a central part of the Gorée Island UNESCO World Heritage site, named in 1978, and a major draw for foreign tourists to Senegal. Only 20 minutes by ferry from the city centre of Dakar, 200,000 visitors a year pass through the Museum here. Many, especially those descended from enslaved Africans, describe highly emotional reactions to the place, and the pervasive influence of Ndiaye's interpretation of the historical significance of the building: especially the Door of No Return through which Ndiaye argued millions of enslaved Africans left the continent for the last time. Before his death in 2008, Ndiaye would personally lead tours through basement cells, out through the Door of No Return, and hold up to tourists iron shackles, like those used to bind enslaved Africans. Since the publication of Alex Haley's novel Roots: The Saga of an American Family in 1976, African American tourists from the United States have made the Museum a focal point, often a highly emotion laden one, of pilgrimages hoping to reconnect with their traditional African heritage.

Famous world figures who have toured the Maison des Esclaves during their visits to Senegal includes Pope John Paul II, Nelson Mandela, Michael Jackson, and Barack Obama.

References

References

1. link. (2016-03-03 . CNN Interactive, Andy Walton. 2005. Note: the link is to a reprint on the Historian's discussion list that was a prime source for the article's quotes.)
2. [https://web.archive.org/web/20040707075531/http://www.time.com/time/europe/pilgrim/goree.html "Through the Door of No Return"], ''TIMEeurope'', June 27, 2004.
3. (2017). "Prologue: Citizens of the World". Cambridge University Press.
4. Benoist, Joseph-Roger de. (2003). "Histoire de Gorée". Maisonneuve & Larose.
5. Porter, Anna. (2014). "Goree Island: The Door of No Return". Queen's Quarterly.
6. (18 February 2009). "B. J. Ndiaye, Curator of Landmark in Slave Trade, Dies at 86". [[The New York Times]].
7. Ndiaye and other Senegalese have always claimed that the site is more than a memorial and is an actual historic site in the transport of Africans to European colonies in the Americas, and is underappreciated by Anglophone researchers.Laurie Goering, [http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286-8245497_ITM "Role of Gorée Island in slave trade now disputed by historians"]. ''Chicago Tribune'', February 1, 2005.
8. Sue Segar, [http://www.news24.com/News24/Africa/Features/0,,2-11-37_1574958,00.html "Senegal's island of pain"] {{Webarchive. link. (2005-11-19 . News24(SA)/Panapress. August 18, 2004.)
9. UNESCO (2001).
10. Adam Goodheart, [https://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0CE3DA1E3DF930A25754C0A9659C8B63 "The World; Slavery's Past, Paved Over Or Forgotten"]. ''New York Times'', July 13, 2003.
11. Porter, Anna. "Goree Island: The Door of No Return". Queen's Quarterly.
12. Howard W. French, [https://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E00E5DE1E31F935A35750C0A96E958260&fta=y&pagewanted=all "Goree Island Journal; The Evil That Was Done Senegal: A Guided Tour"]. ''The New York Times'', Friday, March 6, 1998.
13. (January 2001). "The Slave Trade as History and Memory: Confrontations of Slaving Voyage Documents and Communal Traditions". The William and Mary Quarterly.
14. Fisher, Max. (28 June 2013). "What Obama really saw at the 'Door of No Return,' a disputed memorial to the slave trade".
15. John Murphy, [http://www.dailypress.com/news/nationworld/bal-slavery0630,0,6996375.story "Powerful symbol, weak in facts". Slavery: A thriving tourist trade has been built around the dubious historic role of a Senegal island] {{Webarchive. link. (2013-07-03 . ''Baltimore Sun'', June 30, 2004.)
16. See the images of Ndaiye in NYT (2008) and UNESCO (2002).
17. link. (2009-02-20 . ''Minneapolis Star Tribune'', January 10, 2007.)
18. See Ebron (1999), Nicholls (2004), and Austen (2001).
19. Kumbon, Daniel. (2015-06-23). "The slaves house: Remembering the cruelty of man against man".
20. Nakamura, David. (June 27, 2013). "Obamas visit Door of No Return, where slaves once left Africa". Washington Post.