Visiting Slavery’s Ugly Past

JUST off the coast of the African country of Senegal, near the city of Dakar, lies Île de Gorée. For 312 years, until 1848, this island served as a center for a flourishing trade in human souls. Archives from the French port of Nantes show that between 1763 and 1775 alone, more than 103,000 slaves were traded from Gorée through the port of Nantes.

Today an average of 200 visitors a day tour the Maison des Esclaves, the Slave House museum. Tour guide Joseph Ndiaye recounted some of the horrors experienced by the helpless victims: “Our ancestors were deported, their families separated, their hides branded, like so much cattle.” Whole families arrived in chains. “The mother might go to America, the father to Brazil, the children to the Antilles,” related the guide.

“After being weighed,” Ndiaye explained, “the men were appraised by their age and origin, with certain ethnic groups prized for their hardiness or as supposedly prolific breeders. The Yoruba, for example, were prized as ‘stallions.’”

Underweight captives were fattened like geese before they were auctioned. Slave traders chose young women to use for their sexual pleasure each night. Rebellious slaves were hanged by the thorax instead of by the throat, to prolong their agony.

Pope John Paul II visited Gorée in 1992. The New York Times reported that “he apologized for the slave trade, asking forgiveness for all who had taken part in it, including the Catholic missionaries who had accepted the bondage of Africans as part of the normal order of things.”

Not everyone, however, is willing to acknowledge what took place. Two and a half years ago, before the Nantes records were unearthed, a French Jesuit asserted that only 200 to 500 slaves a year were sold at Gorée. Until now, Mr. Ndiaye observed, “the world has never come to terms with the enormity of this evil.”

[Picture Credit Lines on page 31]

Gianni Dagli Orti/Corbis

Yann Arthus-Bertrand/Corbis

Reproduced from DESPOTISM—A Pictorial History of Tyranny