(crossposted from Slavery list and H-CIVWAR)
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Editor's Note:
Although I am unable to provide the
context in which Professor Curtin
drafted these comments, they clearly
raise important issues for historians
and humanities concerned with Africa.
Not only is there the issue of the
creation of tradition, but also the
purposes of, and motives for, such
acts of creation. Perhaps readers of
H-AFRICA have comments on such issues.
mep
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Goree was never important in the slave trade, which flourished in
Senegambia only at the mouth of the Senegal to the north or the
Gambia to the south. But Goree is an interesting nineteenth-century
town that can be used to attract tourists, especially African
Americans looking for their roots.
The leading figure supporting the hoax today is a man named Joseph
N'Diaye, who is the curator of a house that has long been called the
"House of Slaves." It was actually built in 1775-78 as the home of a
wealthy trader, who may or may not have kept a few slaves on the
lower floor at some time. It has been called the house of slaves at
least since my first visit there in 1955, though the slave-trade
shrine that N'Diaye has developed dates from the 1970s at the
earliest.
The reason for calling it the house of slaves in uncertain. It is
architecturally one of the finest houses on Goree, certainly not a
place where slaves would be kept. It is on the shore, however, and
had a first-floor door leading to the water. It may be that people
began imagining that slaves could be sent to sea by that route.
Slaves were not kept in traders' houses in any event.
The claim that the "house of slaves" was a slave-shipping point has
been refuted as long ago as 1958 by Raymond Mauny, shortly afterward
the first professor of African history at the Sorbonne. [see Les
Guides Bleus: Afrique de l'Ouest (1958 ed.), p. 123.]
On slave numbers, N'Diaye used to claim that 20 million slaves were
shipped from Goree, 5 million of them to the United States. At the
time of my visit in February 1992, he had increased the number to 40
million. Meanwhile, the government historical museum at the end of
the island of Goree gives a range of 8 to 10.5 million reaching the
New World from all of Africa.
A lot of people have been taken in by the Goree scam. They even had
the Pope out there in late February 1992, but scam has no following
at the local university. The "house of slaves" has become an
emotional shrine to the slave trade, rather than a serious museum.
Slave exports from Goree began about 1670 and continued till about
1810, at no more than 200 to 300 a year in important years and none
at all in others. Thirty thousand total exports through Goree would
be an outside estimate.
In short, though Goree is a picturesque place, it was marginal to the
slave trade, lacking the water routes to the interior provided by
the Senegal and Gambia Rivers.