Gorée Island

Gorée Island (by the ferry dock)

Two Saturdays ago we took a trip out to Gorée Island, a sort of holding and launching location for the Atlantic slave trade. We visited the "House of Slaves" in which they locked up human lives while waiting for the ships to come take them across the ocean. Slave masters could choose to sleep with the young girls and women, no problem, but if they got pregnant, they were released to make a living for themselves on the island. We saw a tiny windowless cell underneath a stair case which was used to punish slaves who stepped out of line. They told us that after slave-trade had been banned, Nelson Mandela visited this place and went inside that cell. After two minutes he came out weeping.

House of Slaves

There is some controversy about how and where the slaves on Gorée Island were actually kept, and it was not as large a trading center as some other posts, but all the same: human life is God-breathed and therefore VALUABLE. Hunting humans to capture and place in lifelong captivity so that one can have a new weapon or trinket should never sit right with us. A girl is worth so much more than a mirror.

After the House of Slaves and a museum about it all, we explored the rest of the island before taking the ferry back to Dakar. The island itself was very picturesque and I took about a 900 pictures of the buildings alone (only a slight exaggeration..I seriously took a lot). Fun fact: there is so much smog you can hardly see the city from the island, though in actuality Gorée is just off the coast. The water was very inviting, however, and I was slightly disappointed in myself for not wearing clothes good for swimming (or a swimsuit...).

Here are some pictures I took on Gorée:

You don't need drying machines in Senegal

A street scene on Gorée (minus the tourists who usually stick to the streets with souvenir vendors)