Gori Island is about 3 kilometers from the Senegalese capital, Dakar (Al Jazeera)
Goree Island, Senegal -
Dozens of the best young Senegalese minds are currently residing on Goree Island. There is no happier news for Europeans than this if history went back two centuries, or went two more centuries, when this number of girls or even teenagers or tough men existed. The title of a profitable slave journey that ends with the one who survived the waves, a slave carrying the burdens of life and the shackles of history on his neck and feet.
It is Ghori...that brown palm that nature extended between the green banks of the waves, before the waves of tears watered it, and it rises above the brown backs of those who pass by it, old men, boys and women, the whips of the white slavers who established the pillars of Western economies, and the wealth of peoples and individuals and institutions on lists of the hunger and tears of slaves. The Africans, a large part of whom crossed on the waves accompanying Ghori, and were taken off by ships sailing into the unseen, before throwing them into the last resting place of pain, and the farthest point from the place of birth.
These girls residing on the island receive a qualitative education, as they are among those with the highest averages in Senegal, and from time to time they prepare for educational trips and residencies in upscale European cities, in a new drawing of the relationship between Gori and Europe, turning that bloody page, just as the sails of ships were folded, signaling whoever could. Survival of slaves and access to western ports.
Maryam Ba School on Gori Island (Al Jazeera)
A plateau of pain amidst the waves
Gori stands as a small plateau or hill asleep among the waves, no more than 3.5 kilometers from the Senegalese capital, Dakar. The historic island has been bathed by strong waves since time immemorial, but it may have been bathed more by the waterfalls of tears shed by nearly 20 million African slaves, who were transported through the Gate of No Return, which now represents a part of From the African Slavery Museum.
The area of this island does not exceed 28 hectares, with a width that does not exceed 300 meters, and a length that bends to the waves before completing one kilometre, yet it entered history with depth, violence, and severe pain.
UNESCO has classified this island as a scientific heritage since 1978, and for decades it has become an essential part of Senegal’s tourism resources, with hundreds of tourists arriving daily, and a continuous economic movement that benefits the country’s economy and the population of the village (the island), whose number does not exceed 1,200 people. They live on the abundant money that memories of tears and traces of the slave route bring in, and the painful stories and information that quenches tourists’ thirst about millions crossing the waves at the mercy of the white man’s whips.
An arena of European conflict
The Portuguese shook off their robes on the shore of Gori in the year 1444 AD, thus planting the first claws of European slavery on this peaceful island. Not even 6 years had passed since their landing on this seashore, until they established a commercial center and a church whose mass was celebrated in the year 1450. Then came the time of the Portuguese, and they took control. The Dutch arrived on the island in 1617, before the French, British and then French forces entered in succession for 4 centuries, ending with complete control by the French since 1817 AD.
Due to Gori's role in the slave trade and its being a direct port separated from the United States by no more than 8,000 nautical miles, it was an arena of conflict and competition between the colonial powers that exchanged control over it 17 times.
The French were the luckiest, as their control over it extended for more than two centuries, and the period of Western control over the island was full of painful journeys that transported kings, vulgar people, scholars, children, and warriors in chains, walking like animals.
The painful irony appears in the fact that the bloody, black centuries of Gori Island were in the depths of the European Enlightenment and the Western mind’s relentless march towards democracy and human rights, the meaning and freedom of which diminishes unless it is European, a settler, an invader, or a slaver roaming the horizons.
Senegalese human rights activist Aliyoun Thione (Al Jazeera)
In an interview with Al Jazeera Net, Senegalese human rights activist Aliyoun Tione believes that Gori is the story of the most horrific civilizational upheaval in history, as European ships took over the presence of terrorism to transport them to Western farms, fields, mines, and factories, and to establish their industrial renaissance on African backs.
Tune looks at the period as a period in which we reached the bottom in dealing with the African human being and his dignity, when there were those who did not regard him as human beings; This is the nature of colonialism, because, according to him, colonialism is always domination, a change of identities, names, language, and culture, and therefore, like slavery, it is considered a crime against humanity.
Torture, fattening and abuse rooms
The tour guide who accompanied us on Gori Island wanders between the narrow corridors of Gori Castle, and between the small cells that were the refuge of those crossing to where there is no return. The man does not give you long time to satisfy your insatiable curiosity and passion for knowing all the details, as the task of telling history and resolving African pains has become another field. It generates money for quite a few guide and tourism service providers, after the island was another field for generating money from the pain of the tears of displaced slaves.
From the alleys of Gori Island (the island)
Among the city's alleys, there are many facades painted in the favorite red and yellow colors of the Senegalese flag, and the colors of the flags of the countries that occupied the island in ancient times.
There is a church and a mosque that was originally a monastery for nuns. UNESCO, which restored it, chose not to raise its lighthouse or extend its height, in order to preserve “what was” an architectural formation on the island, which has painful scars in the history of Africa.
Nothing but bestiality was the title of the European dealings with those brought from the “Black Lands.” They chose the strong and vagabonds, while the weak and insignificant ones received special fattening on the island before being shipped to other shores. Those who were not fit to be fattened were also eliminated by throwing them into the ocean.
The young man with a strong build received special care, as long as he was tame and easy to lead. If he was one of the people of skepticism or reluctance, heavy iron bars and shackles would be there for him, and he would be kept in narrow cells called slave houses.
House of slaves on Gori Island (Al Jazeera)
The construction of these narrow cells began in 1780, and although their area did not exceed 6.76 square metres, they were like boxes in which more than 15 people were crowded, side by side in the pain wards, and they were shackled while they were in the cells, and these shackles were only removed from them. Once a day during the period when they are allowed to enter the bathroom, says the tour guide who accompanied us on the island.
As for the rebels, they were imprisoned in stone cages whose height did not exceed 0.8 meters, which would be a painful rehabilitation course for the rebellious African, so that he would bow his head to the whips of slave labor and the days, and the misfortunes of the late waves of fortune.
As for the large rooms in the House of Slaves, their area did not exceed 10 square metres, and they housed more than 50 inmates, with tenderness and warmth, who were thrown into the hell of slavery by fate, coming from many parts of Africa.
Because fattening these human goods is an important necessity to raise their prices, they received meals of beans and palm oil, in order to increase the weight, which contributes to increasing the price of the human supply.
Just as slaves differed according to weight and strength, they also differed according to gender and age. Strong girls, teenagers, and young men were more attractive in marketing than others, given the prospects open to them in work, productivity, and childbearing as well.
28 houses were built in Gori, known as slave houses. Since this trade stopped at the beginning of the twentieth century, these houses have turned into dwellings buried under the rubble of black history, while the Senegalese government turned one of these houses into a museum, after Gori entered the list in 1976. World heritage, but through the abuse of the white man against his black brother.
Because the slave homes are the last port before crossing into the painful unknown, a crossing extended between the death rows leading to the anchorage from which the slavers’ ships sailed. The Europeans chose for this crossing a very accurate name, “the road of no return.”
Entrance to the slave house on Gori Island (Al Jazeera)
Numbers are conflicting regarding those crossing the path of no return, as various African accounts say their number was not less than 20 million people, while in some European literature the number drops to 11 million, which in the end is a huge number covered in blood and tears, a European and American era that lasted more than 400 years.
There were many sources of selling slaves in Africa, as kings and leaders sold their followers, while internecine wars also provided huge numbers of prisoners who turned into queues in slave markets.
The prices of slaves varied according to the mood of the slaver and the movement of the market. A strong, muscular person might be sold for a foot of salt, which was a lucrative trade equivalent to gold today, or perhaps he was sold for handfuls of barley or rice. Also, a number of poor African families would sell some of their children to support others. According to what is prevalent in the literature circulating among the residents of the region, without this being proven historically.
Due to the prevalence and difficulty of this phenomenon, the Islamic religious leaders were working forcefully to besiege it, according to what the French merchant Champoneau said, speaking about the Mauritanian scholar Imam Nasser al-Din, “Since the appearance of this marabout, not a single African slave has boarded our ships.”
Senegalese historian Abdel-Rahman Enkida confirmed in an interview with Al Jazeera Net that the "Ghori slaves" were not only from Senegal, but were brought by caravans from Mali, Nigeria, Niger, Mauritania, and many African countries.
Senegalese historian Abderrahmane Enkida (Al Jazeera)
The Senegalese prince returning from captivity
It is a very strange irony that one of the African princes who were captured and enslaved actually returned through the crossing of no return, a case that some historians talk about as one of the rarest things that happened in the history of the island, which is swollen with the history of tragedy.
At the age of thirty, the young Senegalese prince, Ayoub Suleiman Diallo, fell into the net of slavers. He was sailed with planks and props, the waves broke, and the shores of the homeland were visible from afar, after he had been swallowed by the unseen, so that the blue of the waves and the violence of the slavers wove another garment of life, not one of the garments of African princes and leaders. , especially the grandchildren of the learned King Ibrahim Diallo Fulani.
It was the slave journey that precipitated the chains on Job’s feet, so that he would be the third of the two slaves he wanted to sell and end up captive to the pagan Mande people, who sold the trio to Captain Pike of the Royal African Company and the slave journey led him to take him to Maryland in the United States, where he was sold and worked there. For a period in a tobacco farm, before he was able to escape, which did not take long, he was embraced by prison, but his broad culture got him out of prison, while he remained a Muslim despite the many offers that were showered upon him to be a “black Christian.”
Portrait of Ayoub Suleiman Diallo, preserved in the British National Portrait Gallery (Foreign Press)
Fate threw a lifeline to Ayoub Suleiman, when he met the judge and Anglican priest Thomas Plaut, who was surprised by the man’s broad culture and the depth of his religious knowledge, in addition to the fact that he was one of the sons of luxury in his country. He then allowed him to write a letter to his parents containing a request for help to pay a ransom on his behalf, and an invitation to his host. From 32 people proving that he was the son of the princes, see whether his people answered him or not. What is certain is that he traveled to the British capital, London, and regained his freedom with an official sealed letter. This was in the year 1733, and in parallel with that he began to bear the name Job Ben Salomon, and his relationship with the London elite developed. It reached the point of being received by the English King George II (died 1760).
With his return to his country in 1734, and the restoration of Bondo’s weak authority, Suleiman maintained a special affection for the British, only to fall into oblivion for two centuries or more, before his letter, written in the three languages: Arabic, English, and French, was discovered in 2015 and transmitted to the world through an article. Written by French writer Jean-Pierre Pat, published in 2020 in the French newspaper Liberation, and included many of the previous details.
The three years spent by the Senegalese Prince Ayoub bin Suleiman were not a simple break in his life, but rather they were the most important point of fame in the life of the latter, who endured the pain of three arguments as a slave from the “class of scholars and intellectuals” before being forgotten again, so that nothing is known about him. Except for what Western texts revealed, as he was at least the only lucky one among the victims of the slave trade, who was able to return to his country and regain his freedom and the possession of his fathers.
A Mauritanian slave turned into a symbol in America
If the Senegalese prince Ayoub Suleiman regained his freedom and his homeland, then the son of the northern bank, the Mauritanian Sheikh Omar bin Saeed Al-Fouti, also underwent a long-term slave journey that threw him on American shores, moving from the Sultanate and prestige to slavery and slavery, in the country of Uncle Sam, far from His original homeland is in the Fota region in the riverside states of Mauritania, where he lived for 37 years of his life, as a jurist, teacher, and obedient master, before slavery threw him into slavery in the city of Fayetteville, North Carolina, in the United States of America.
Omar bin Saeed of Senegal captured a slave in America and wrote his memoirs at the end of his life (social networking sites)
Bin Said was born in 1770, and received his initial upbringing in a conservative family and in wealthy circles. He memorized the Holy Qur’an, learned the Arabic language, performed Hajj to the Holy House of God, and participated in wars against the pagan tribes in the West African region.
But the course of the man’s life turned upside down in 1807, when he was captured by the Bambara tribes along with a number of his family and relatives, and then they sold him to slave traders who threw them into slave ports, on the American shores after an arduous journey full of cruelty and suffering that lasted a month and a half in Sea view.
Ben Said's ownership passed from one master to another, and he was imprisoned as a result of his escape from his first master. There, in prison, he documented some of his notes and wrote his thoughts on the walls, which brought him to the attention of General James Owen (brother of John Owen, governor of North Carolina), to get him out of prison. But he went to work on his own farm.
The Fulani veins continued to pulse in the conscience of Omar, who was expelled from his kingdom, his country, and his authority, and his slaves spared no effort to expel him from his religion, but he remained difficult, difficult to assimilate into a civilization he was not familiar with, and a world into which he was forcibly included without any ability to escape from the violence of the shackles. Even if the two chains widened and allowed the man who lived in the shackles of slavery and exile for 55 years, to move a little, and to write with his pen the story of his tragedy, and the history of the terrorism that was practiced on him, so that his memoirs would come in 28 pages and included an account of his life and the scourges and tragedies he suffered, before he... A stranger with a face, hand, and tongue leaves the world in Uncle Sam's country.
Bin Said's memoirs carry great symbolism as they are the only memoirs written in Arabic by an enslaved African in the United States.
He opened it with the Holy Qur’an, specifically Surat Al-Mulk, which means that the man remained stubbornly stubborn on his conversion to Islam, and the pressures and bargains did not succeed in pushing him to abandon it.
Despite the great importance of these memoirs, they remained forgotten and were not found until the end of the twentieth century, and later they became the possession of Congress and became available to everyone starting in 2019.
A painting from inside the “slave” house on Goree Island - Senegal (Al Jazeera)
After more than 5 decades that Omar bin Saeed spent as a slave enslaved far from home and loved ones, he died in 1864 without leaving a trace, bringing to an end his life of more than ninety years, most of which he spent as a slave of the type of “jurists,” thus concluding a life whose end was not like It began in 1770, when he was a strong leader of the Fulani nationality.
On a hill in the “Bladen” area, the man’s tombstones appear, and the city authorities of Fayetteville built a mosque in his name in 1991 in memory of him and in recognition of his cultural and social status, according to what was documented by Mauritanian historian Dr. Sidi Ahmed Ould El Amir.
Omar bin Saeed was distinguished by his extensive culture and the biography that he wrote about himself, which made him a landmark in the cultural influence of African slaves in the life of the West, an influence that had been stifled by racism for decades, before he rose up screaming from Martin Luther King’s throat, “I have a dream.”
Ayoub Suleiman Diallo and Omar bin Said are only an example of what the Western ships carried from the elites and commoners of the African peoples, and the aggression they wrote, but they are also an address for the millions who crossed from the eternal island of “Gori”, the icon of tourism now in Senegal, and the address of African terror for 4 centuries. .
A rising march towards modernity
With the end of the era of slavery, Gori began a new era. It hosted one of the most important modern schools in West Africa, but it bore the name of one of the French travelers, William Ponty, and since its establishment in 1903, this school turned into a mine for creating African leaders, who managed the helm after independence. Among the famous leaders who went through this school were the late Houphout Boigny, President of Ivory Coast, Modibo Keita, the first President of Mali, and former Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade.
A side of Gori Island (the island)
The island also houses the Mariam Ba Girls School, in commemoration and status of the world-famous Senegalese writer. It also houses one of the oldest mosques in Senegal, which was built in 1890 and still follows the movement of the wind and waves, but without a lighthouse.
In addition to the millions of tourists who constantly visit this city, it has also been visited by global leaders and influencers, including US Presidents Bill Clinton in 1998, George Bush in 2003, and Barack Obama in 2013, who saw in Gori an experience that was a “strong” reminder of the necessity of defending human rights. .
The traces of these leaders still remain on the island, as their pictures and scenes from their visits to the island are hung in some of its rooms. As for the African leader Nelson Mandela, he gave his name to one of the island’s most important squares, in honor of the memory and efforts of one of the most famous African leaders, who turned into a global symbol of freedom, emancipation, and the fight against racism. .
One of the landmarks that continues to characterize Goree Island is the Statue of Slave Freedom, where a black African man stands tall and is embraced by his wife. They stand on top of a drum, breathing in the scent of freedom, with broken chains hanging from their wings. The drum symbolizes one of the most horrific traps for catching slaves, as they were rushing to their destination. The sound of the drum in an ancient African ritual glorifies art and singing, and as soon as young men and women flock to that mighty drumming, they are seized by chains and shackles, and their forced deportation to the crossing of no return begins.
This name was given to it, according to the tour guide on the island, because it is the last era of slaves in Africa. After they leave that door, they never return to the continent, and are transported in large ships to the Americas to work on the plantations of tobacco, cotton, cocoa, sugar cane, and others.
The Door of No Return on Gori Island (Al Jazeera)
Although the entry - previously - of slaves to that island was missing, today the crossings to and from it are easy and accessible, and reaching it is no longer a journey towards death or slavery, but rather it has become a recreation on a ship that rides the blue waves of the waves, landing on the island after 35 minutes, no more. And the sheets of days open before her, black with facts, red with tearful memories.
While it was previously reserved for slaves and their European masters, it has now become a daily destination for hundreds of Senegalese and foreign tourists, wandering around its sides and asking the tour guides about the details of what happened to those passing through it in ancient times. Some of them are eager for the moment to take pictures, others are suffocated by the horror of the details, and some prolong the moment. Standing contemplating the scene, recalling those painful memories, on the rubble of the past carved from those deep African pains.
With the threads of evening, the rocky black stones are covered with the golden rays of the sun, before the night extends its carpet over those small houses asleep between the wings of the waves, and the beach plays the melodies of the sunset, whose first symphonies receive a wailing and bloody wailing whose vibrations flow into the deep sea and over thousands of kilometers, the story of the black face continues. From the history of the West towards the African continent.
Source: Al Jazeera + websites