Goree Island

We visited Goree island this week; it's a major site for tourists in Senegal.

Here's a photo of the picturesque island, complete with sunshine and swimmers:

Here's a nice photo of Dakar and its skyline that I took from the island:

And here's a picture of the hole that was used as a punishment cell, into which soldiers would shove twenty or more men and women if and when they ever "misbehaved" at the Goree Island prison:

Occupying the Westernmost tip of the African continent, what is now the country of Senegal has the dubious accolade of being one of the largest sites for the "export" of captured Africans as slaves to the New World. Goree Island was where captured Senegalese people would wait for the ships that would take them there.

We toured the island with IHP, and the experience was pretty surreal. Middle school students on field trips, masses of tourists - mostly French - and a celebrity visit from one of Senegal's most prominent wrestlers combined on a small, beautiful, highly commercialized site.

The stories that our guide told us were (almost needless to say) horrifying and sobering and depressing and confusing. We talk about the slave trade in American high school classes, but never about the side of it that took place in Africa. Standing where so many people had on their way to a life of slavery; hearing the statistics rattled off one after another; acknowledging quite how oblivious I am to the vast majority of Senegalese history (and African history in general), to what losing millions of people does to a place, to what tribes pitted against each other does to a society - it was a lot to take in. Here are a few more photos that might give you a sense of the place:

Our guide's silhouette

One of the cells

French for "children"

The first of those three pictures reminded me of an idea from the last Batman movie - how true hell is only possible when you can glimpse a shimmer of light, have a shimmer of false hope. Slits in the walls helped guards survey the captives more efficiently; they must have also allowed just a hint of daylight and familiarity to creep into the hellish, crowded prisons. I can only imagine this served to make the contrast feel even more real and horrible.

They say Mandela visited this site when he came to Senegal, and he entered the punishment cell alone. After twenty minutes, reminded of the years he had spent in prison, feeling the history first-hand, he emerged in tears.

One of my classmates is studying "doors" for his independent research project in India, Senegal, and Argentina. He analyzed the gate of Goree Island for us: it's a one-way door, not so much a door even as it is a passage whose presence was intended to symbolize that for those who walked through it, there would be no return.

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You might have noticed that I'm sounding a little vague about the details of Goree's history, and my own emotions about it; I'm even starting to use more poetic language that might sound less personal. That's because I'm still struggling to get past thinking about Goree's tone.

As I mentioned, it's a top tourist attraction. Our guide was friendly and energetic, sharing statistics of horrors with a tone that probably would have been more appropriate at the Natural History Museum in Washington, D.C.

It seemed as though this was a place where tourists could pay an entry fee to feel bad about themselves (and the ways their predecessors may have profited from this history), but only in order to later feel good about themselves for having gone to such an "enriching," "important," "educational" site - and doubly good for having supported the local community after their tour, by buying one of the tacky t-shirts or earrings that are sold from stalls around the island.

It's an ironic combiation - sobering history and contemporary consumerist cheerfulness - and I still don't know what to make of it. Is this an essential site for everyone around the world to see? That's certainly what I was thinking at first, as I snapped as many photos as possible to share with people on this blog.

Was the information that I learned there reliable, and if other people in Senegal have told me contradictory stories about the place, then why is it that I feel a greater sense of queasiness to question the historical accuracy of this site, as opposed to any other?

Why do I reflect so much on how I interacted with this site, on what it meant to me personally - can this be attributed to maturity or narcissism? Self-awareness or supremely missing the point?

Are my assumptions about how other tourists interact with this site founded? And what if they're not? And on IHP do we fancy ourselves triply good for doing all the things the other tourists are doing...but with more analysis after the fact?

And should it be depressing, or inspiring, or confusing, or what to see how local residents have turned this island into a highly profitable enterprise?

And how did this history ever happen?

And why do we talk about the past as though it were a parallel universe?

And if this blog post - or my earlier one on the dump in India - makes a reader feel pity, then what do I think of that?

I think I'm starting to understand more of what they mean when they say that IHP doesn't lead to many answers, but it does lead to more questions.