Senegal: Africa’s Art – and Slave Trade

[excerpted from, Africa & Middle East: Stories across Cultures ©2023]

Standing before the Door of No Return was especially chilling.

Many go to Senegal for its glorious music, nature, and general cultural vibe including some stunning art. I deeply appreciate all of this – but I’d come to learn more about the slave trade, abhorrently also referred to as trade in ‘ebony’ and ‘infamous traffic’.

As a native of the US, I’ve observed the never-ending legacy of slavery more than a century after its abolishment. There are many aspects of my country’s history, and its present, with which I disagree and which prompted me 2 decades ago to emigrate – but its history of slavery is among the worst. (Genocide of the indigenous peoples ranks up there, too, along with a multitude of lesser but still egregious acts.)

How can any human being enslave another? It is unfathomable to me, yet this abhorrent practice was widespread throughout the Americas, spurred on by several European nations, for centuries…and with the cooperation of certain African tribes who specialized in warring and capturing of others in order to feed the supply.

Certainly, human trafficking and enslavement has existed from the beginning of humanity up to and including the present, across a wide range of cultures. Yet it is far beyond my comprehension.

And so – to Dakar’s Goree Island I went, often cited as the most active slave-trading port in Africa spanning the 15th to 19th centuries, to visit the Maison des Esclaves – House of Slaves – with its Door of No Return. (In reality, many died before even boarding the ship.) Since the 1980s, scholars – an attempt to minimize or in denial, perhaps? – have downplayed the island’s significance; nevertheless, this museum has always been considered a memorial rather than a mere historical site, though UNESCO did inscribe it in 1978 as world heritage, 16 years after the museum opened. The house was originally owned by a notorious Afro-French woman, the signara Anne Pépin, who herself owned 3 ships used for human trafficking.

Signares – women of African or mixed descent (Anne’s father was French, her mother also a signara) who gained power, money, and influence through their European husbands – and who were often intricately involved in trade of humans as well as goods. By other terms, the same category of local wives to European men existed during both Portuguese and British occupations of the area. Women throughout history have gained power via marriage – but then to engage in human trafficking? It beggars belief.

The French – and before them, the Dutch, and their West India Trading Company that began the slave trade at this location in 1627, just 6 years after the company was established. And more than once, the British, and before any of them, the Portuguese – who continued to invade Senegal’s borders repeatedly following its 1960 independence, prompting the Senegalese government to petition the UN Security Council on 5 separate occasions.

The French – with a presence throughout West Africa, Francophone to this day and continuing to use the West African franc as their currency with a requirement that a certain percentage be held in French banks. The country’s 1685 Black Code governing slave trade was finally abolished in 1794, only to be reestablished by Bonaparte just 6 years later.

In 1815 the Congress of Vienna condemned slavery; the British finally abolished the trade in 1833, the French another 15 years later – while the US, my native land and one of the primary recipients, only did so in 1865 following a civil war. (It would take another full century before any meaningful civil rights movement for African-Americans would even begin, an ongoing issue to this day.)

The Musée Théodore Monod d'Art Africain, one of the oldest such in West Africa (est. 1936), was another of my destinations. A mix of contemporary and traditional art, it provided me with a better sense of Senegal’s cultural scene. The museum serves as the primary location for the Dakar Biennale; beginning in 1990, the event welcomes contemporary artists from anywhere in the continent as well as the diaspora, and alternates between literature and the visual arts.

To my surprise, I discovered that just 2 weeks prior to my visit a long-awaited institution opened: the Musée des Civilisations Noires, representing artworks not only of Senegal but from cultures throughout the continent and beyond. An especially large facility, the museum deliberately left some of its galleries empty – awaiting reparations, or the return of art stolen from the country by its various colonizers over 5 centuries. One of the points of resistance to such thus far: these European nations have often claimed that the African countries were ill-equipped to receive and care for such artworks, lacking in proper facilities. (Perhaps true, this smacks of ongoing colonial attitudes to this day.) On the opening of this museum, the president of Senegal declared that excuse invalid…and some pieces had already begun to find their way home just 1 month later. The galleries, highlighting Africa as the cradle of humanity, focusing on slave trade throughout the Americas (and the guilty European traders), and contemporary black artists from around the world, already had a compelling story from the museum’s opening.

And what did I learn?

Often, any knowledge I gain in the places I visit could perhaps have been acquired from afar – but would never feel genuine to me. I need to walk the streets of a place, gaze at its art, speak with its people, eat the foods, breathe the air. What I seek above all is a bodily-felt sense of place, and of a culture – yes, its most modern version of itself, but still and always with stories to tell me – many of them, without words.

Dakar, while a challenging city, is also vibrant. I went in search of slave trade legacy – and also discovered art, in full celebration of Africa’s identity.

Africa & Middle East: Stories across Cultures, by Anne Hilty, ©2023