Prof. Lobban has probably gone too far in likening Prof. Curtin's
paraphrased remarks on the place of Goree in the Atlantic slave trade
to the denial of the Holocaust. I've heard Curtin's remarks before,
and his rather simple, empirical point is that this tiny island,
nestled beneath the arm of the Cape Verde Pennisula, was a less
likely spot for the shipment of many thousands (let alone the 10-40
million that N'diaye suggests) of human beings than were the mouths
of major rivers.
Of course empiricism has its limits. The Maison des Esclaves on
Goree has a potent symbolic effect. But much of that potency
derives from the enormity of the slave trade, from the fact that
it was not an event that occured at one time or place, but was
instead a process that evolved over hundreds of years and along
thousands of miles of coastline.
The desire to fasten upon Goree as a comprehensible symbol of the
incomprehensible, is surely enhanced by Dakar's proximity to the
United States and Europe, by the fact that it is the entrepot for
pilgrims to the Gambia, by the fact that good food and drink are
there to refresh one after one's visit, and by the skill of the
Senegalais in receiving visitors. I know. During my four years at
the Universite de Dakar, I took dozens of American visitors to Goree.
But all that has more to do with the phenomenon of tourism than
with historical understanding. As historians, we need to enhance,
in our students and the public, the imagination necessary to
conceive of huge tragedies that touched many places, without
resorting to necessarily limited and sentimentalized symbols. On
balance, Philip Curtin has surely enhanced that sort of historical
imagination.