”There are lots of people who are descended from slaves here, but no one dares to say anything,” fisherman Birahime Beye said sadly, tending his nets in a public park at the heart of Senegal’s historic capital, Saint Louis.
A key transit point for the untold numbers of Africans ripped from their homes and sold into slavery from the 15th century, Saint Louis these days seems blanketed by a collective amnesia, its inhabitants leery of resurrecting — or even acknowledging — its horrible history.
Similar legacies burden much of coastal West Africa, from massive Mauritania to the tiny archipelago of Cape Verde — all of them collecting points for innocents sent in chains to a watery death or an uncertain future in servitude as they made their way to Europe.
These days, however, the migration is going in the opposite direction as the coastal towns, with their bucolic beaches and tranquil ambiance, attract tourists. And increasingly, those tourists are seeking out the shameful past that locals would just as soon forget.
”When we started to develop cultural tourism we thought that we would emphasise Saint Louis’ historic architecture,” said Abdoul Aidara, the director of the local historical society. ”We thought we would leave out the cultural history of slavery, mostly because the locals were not interested.”
But where there was little slave narrative, there are now guides who enthusiastically lead people to the narrow quarters at Maurel and Prom that had served as temporary homes for the transiting slaves.
Cape Verde has seized on the opportunity to turn a page on its slave-trading culture by embracing it, turning the Cidade Velha into a world heritage site with a little help from Spain and Portugal — two countries with equally painful ties to slave trading from West Africa.
”One cannot understand Cidade Velha unless one sees its roots — a colony founded by Portugal to traffic slaves,” said Cape Verde historian Antonio Correia e Silva.
”It was the first point in the Atlantic to receive, handle and then ship out slaves,” he said, while also populating the archipelago in a bid to jump-start an agriculturally based economy.
Since the late 1990s, Cape Verde authorities have been painstakingly rebuilding Cidade Velha, the first town claimed by Portugal south of the Tropic of Cancer, into a living museum, rehabilitating 15th-century outposts such as the Saint Filipe fort, its cathedral and its monastery.
The restoration is modelled along the lines of Senegal’s Goree Island, which traces the slave-trading routes that stretched from Africa across the Atlantic.
But while Senegal celebrates the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery on Saturday, northern neighbour Mauritania continues to grapple with the repression by one population of another.
Traditionally, the white Moorish population took slaves from black ethnic groups, although black Mauritanians in the mostly Muslim country of 2,7-million have also taken slaves of their own.
Though slavery was officially abolished twice, first in 1981 and then by law in 2003, it continues in one form or another with the tacit approval of local authorities in many parts of the massive north-west African country, human-rights advocates say.
”Ever since the [2003] law was passed, we have seen that any disputes are resolved in favour of the privileged, protecting criminals against any judicial consequences,” said Abdul Aziz Niang, vice-president of the group SOS-Esclaves, which recently released a slave kept as a shepherd for years by his masters.
”Slavery is still currency here,” he added. — Sapa-AFP