We arrived at Dakar on the west coast of Africa at 8.00 am on Saturday 23 November. Someone on the ship had advised us to change our excursion from a Dakar City Tour to a ferry ride to visit Goree Island, situated as it is at some distance from the mainland in the Atlantic Ocean. 

We did in fact, have a tour of Dakar while we waited for our ferry. We didn’t stop anywhere to take photos so didn’t really get an impression of Dakar itself. There was a bit of a hiccup with the ferry because our places hadn’t been reserved so we had to wait a couple of hours for the next one. This involved another tour of Dakar in a slightly different direction! Finally, we set off on our ferry trip out to the island on a ferry that takes 350 passengers but looked as if it should take about 100, finally arriving on the island but with a shortened time frame which was a pity.

We walked around the whole of the island before we reached the ‘House of Slaves’. There is so much on the island that is charming, with its pretty houses, its artisans, its international girls’ school, and its tranquil and happy atmosphere with families playing on the beach.

But there was a darker side that we were about to discover. Goree Island is believed to have been a key stop for thousands and thousands of slaves on their brutal journey to the Americas throughout the 16th to 19th centuries.

Groups of up to 200 slaves at a time, men, women and children, were kept separately here in small concrete rooms off passages like this on Goree Island, the largest slave-trading centre on the African coast, ruled in succession by the Portuguese, Dutch, English and French. Although it is now a UNESCO World Heritage site, it is also an exceptional testimony to one of the greatest tragedies in the history of human societies – the North Atlantic Slave Trade. Most experts say that European slave traders sent more than ten million Africans across the Atlantic during the Atlantic Slave Trade. They came from many different ethnic groups across Africa. Many tried to escape from Goree Island and many were shot, or died, and thrown into the sea to feed the sharks.

Slaves had to pass through this door to the waiting ships. The sign over the door reads 'Porte du voyage sans retour' (Beyond the door of no return). They didn’t know where they were going and they would never see their homeland again. 

More than a million Africans are believed to have died before they even reached the Americas. What they endured in captivity in places like Goree Island were nothing compared to the journeys they had to undertake. The slave ship captains and crew packed captives tightly into ships headed to the New World. The ships were floating prisons for those forced on board. Their captors and sailors didn’t know their language and the men were shackled. Many died on the journeys. Despite the loss of life, slavery remained an extremely profitable endeavour for Europeans and Americans and continued for centuries from approximately 1526 to 1867. 

It was just the beginning of what many endured when they reached their slave-masters. France was the first nation to abolish slavery in 1794 (although Napoleon reintroduced it so it wasn’t final until 1848). Britain abolished it in 1807 thanks to white abolitionists like William Wilberforce. However, it took another generation before slavery was formally abolished in the British Empire and even then, slavery continued to exist in British possessions in Africa, South Asia and New Zealand. It continues to rankle that Britain didn’t give any compensation to emancipated ex-slaves while providing considerable financial help to the people who had owned enslaved people. 

Jean and Christian Moisa designed 'The Statue of the Liberation from Slavery' on Goree Island which stands next to the House of Slaves. It was erected in July 2002. It commemorated the end of the slave trade and the victims of slavery. Political controversies connect us to the reality that slavery, however we define it, whether as coerced labour, human trafficking or sexual exploitation continues to be a growing modern problem. It was hard to imagine what it had been used for so many centuries ago. It has left a profound and lasting effect on me.

At the end of a day, full of profound experiences, we set off at 7.00 pm. Bound for The Gambia.