Gorée Island

Where is Gorée and who held it?

Gorée is a tiny island in a sheltered bay off Cap-Vert, the peninsula where Dakar, Senegal’s capital, stands today. Portuguese sailors arrived in the 1440s, and in time the Lebu people who used the island were pushed out. In the early 1600s the Dutch took it and called it Goeree, the name that became Gorée. They had a fort there by 1628.

An English fleet seized it in 1663, the Dutch won it back, and in 1677 a French fleet under Admiral Jean d’Estrées captured it. It stayed French for most of the next three centuries, apart from several British occupations. In 1715 France ran it through the Senegal Company, a chartered company, meaning a business given a royal monopoly. In December 1718 John Law’s Company of the West took over its rights, and in 1719 it became part of his new Company of the Indies (Compagnie des Indes).

Who held power on the mainland around 1715?

The French held an island; Africans ruled the coast. Opposite Gorée lay the Wolof kingdoms of Kayor and Baol. Their ruler from 1695 to 1720, the damel (king) Lat Sukaabe Fall, joined the two under one authority and built a strong state that lived on customs dues, taxes and the slave trade.

The historian Jean Boulègue shows that they refused terms dictated by Europeans. Lat Sukaabe once seized the French company’s director, André Brüe, and released him only for a ransom. On the mainland beaches at Rufisque and Portudal, traders of mixed Portuguese and African families had long done business, and at Rufisque wealthy women traders spoke for the damel with Europeans.

In Senegambia, the lands of the Senegal and Gambia rivers, the Senegalese historian Boubacar Barry shows how the slave trade strengthened warrior regimes called ceddo and brought economic decline and social strife.

What was traded at Gorée?

The French company’s main base was Saint-Louis, at the mouth of the Senegal River to the north; Gorée served the coast to the south and the route to the Gambia River.

European ships brought goods such as cloth, iron bars, guns and alcohol, the usual trade goods on the African coast. In return the company bought hides, ivory, some gold and enslaved people. Gum arabic, a tree resin and the region’s main export to Europe, came from desert merchants and was traded mainly through Saint-Louis, not Gorée.

Captives bought by the company were shipped to the French Caribbean colonies and, under John Law’s company, to Louisiana. The work was deadly for the company’s own men too: of about 2,700 employees and soldiers who stayed in Senegal under the Company of the Indies, more than 1,200 died.

Who were the signares of Gorée?

Signares (from the Portuguese senhora, “lady”) were African and Afro-European women who married European traders by local custom, often called marriage “à la mode du pays”, in the fashion of the country. Their family ties to African traders and nobles made them valuable partners, and the historian George Brooks shows how such women, standing between African and European traders, came to control more and more of the trade.

By the 1700s Gorée had become a mixed town of free and enslaved Africans, signares and their families, and a few Europeans, who died in large numbers from disease. Signares owned houses and enslaved people. Pruneau de Pommegorge, a Frenchman who had worked on this coast, wrote in 1789 that some women owned 30 or 40 slaves and hired them out to the company.

How many enslaved people were shipped from Gorée?

No one knows exactly. Estimates from the SlaveVoyages database put the number of people forced aboard ships from all of Senegambia at about 363,000 in the 1700s and about 755,000 across the whole trade. Most left from the mouths of the Senegal and Gambia rivers.

Gorée’s own share was much smaller. The historian Philip Curtin found that even in busy years no more than two or three hundred people were shipped from the island, and in some years none, while Barry gives about 500 a year at most. Modern estimates for the island’s total range from roughly 26,000 to 50,000. Some memorial accounts have spoken of millions, which the records do not support.

Senegalese scholars such as Pape Chérif Bertrand Bassène argue that Gorée was still a real transit point, and the archaeologist Ibrahima Thiaw notes that missing evidence does not prove nothing happened. Each was a person with a family and a home.

What are the House of Slaves and the Door of No Return?

The Maison des Esclaves, or House of Slaves, is a merchant’s house built in the 1770s or 1780s; sources give dates from about 1775 to 1786. It is linked to the Pépin family, and the signare Anna Colas Pépin lived there in the early 1800s. It did not exist in 1715. Enslaved people may have been kept there, and about a dozen houses on the island may have held captives at one time or another.

In 1962 Boubacar Joseph Ndiaye opened it as a museum. A narrow doorway facing the sea became known as the “Door of No Return”, a modern memorial name. Historians doubt captives boarded ships there, because of the rocks below; ships were loaded from the beach. The museum historian Abdoulaye Camara put it simply: “The door is a symbol.”

In 1996 an article in Le Monde challenged the house’s story, and scholars still debate it, including at a conference of historians in 1997.

What is Gorée like today?

In 1978 UNESCO made Gorée one of the first World Heritage Sites, calling it a place of memory, where the cramped rooms that held enslaved people stand close to the fine homes of the merchants who profited from them. Fort d’Estrées, built in the 1850s, houses a history museum. Visitors have included Pope John Paul II, Nelson Mandela in 1997 and Barack Obama in 2013, and many people of African descent come as pilgrims.

Like Cape Coast Castle in Ghana, it is a place to remember the millions taken from Africa, whether or not they passed through this island.