The Door of No Return
The Isle of the Blessed has a basement. You know this to be the case, but you can see no sign of it as you cast off in a small boat from Dakar harbour and head for this fortress rock just three kilometres offshore, that terrible idyll which was originally simply called Ber and, later, Ila da Palma. Then the British occupiers rechristened it Cape Coast Castle, and finally, it was the French who were ultimately responsible for naming it Gorée, the ‘good harbour’, or Gorée la Joyeuse – ‘Gorée the Fortunate’. However, that was already at a time when the ships with holds full of chained slaves were plying the Atlantic route, and hardly anyone who made it to Gorée considered themselves fortunate.
Nowadays, the ferry from Dakar to Gorée departs every twenty minutes. The women in the boat in their magnificent boubous balance loads of tropical fruit, sugar, sweet potatoes and other produce on their heads. Their destination, this rocky island which once had some fifty thousand people living on it, is now home to only about a thousand. This morning, some of its inhabitants are lazing about in hammocks, while others are strolling down the alleyways under the waving washing, or lying in the meadow above the free-roaming sheep, or just sitting around in an atmosphere filled with the screams of children and seagulls.
This legendary islet at the westernmost tip of Africa measures barely one kilometre long and three hundred metres wide. From the boat, we could easily see the whole of Gorée laid out before us. Greta had the complexion of a Southern European woman, but could trace the roots of her family back to African slaves, so before our visit, she’d been at pains to put me in the picture about the significance of the island.
In 1444, Gorée was occupied by Portugal, and then by France, but subsequently also by the British, the Dutch, the Danes and the Swedes, and then once more by the British, who ran a trading post here for a while. In all, the island changed hands seventeen times; a fort more than a residence, a citadel whose black cannons still loom over Dakar harbour.
The Portuguese took control of the Ila da Palma in the course of searching for the fabled goldfields of West Africa. Barely a hundred years later, a local trade in human trafficking began, and right up to the abolition of slavery in 1848, the island served as a key base for the transportation of slaves to the Americas.
After North America was ‘discovered’ and demand arose for manpower to work the plantations there, as well as in Brazil and on the islands of the West Indies, the slave trade boomed. Between the sixteenth and the nineteenth century, a total of twenty million slaves are believed to have been sold and transported from West Africa to the New World. They also disappeared into the silver mines of Mexico and Peru, the tobacco and cotton plantations of North America, and into the sugar cane fields of the Caribbean. The Dutch sent them to their colonies of Surinam, Berbice and Guyana, and the offshore island of Curaçao soon evolved into the most important slave market in the world.
‘Meanwhile, back in Gorée,’ Greta explained, ‘the slaves became a kind of currency. For instance, the price of a house was reckoned in slaves, and a fine Arab horse cost twelve or fifteen of them. But horses were much in demand in times of war, and so many slaves didn’t find themselves caught up in the transatlantic trade, but instead were bartered within Africa.’
‘Was it a lucrative business?’
‘And how! Slaves were the valuables of the age. In Africa, you could get hold of one for a small quantity of brandy and cheap trade goods to the value of five guilders, and then exchange him in South America for ten times that much in sugar. And then you could sell on that sugar for many times that sum again in Europe, where confectionery was by this time no longer a preserve just of the upper classes. Plus, it changed people’s eating habits here completely, and incidentally also gave rise to the dentistry profession. It took no time for the European slavetrading concerns to start establishing their own plantations in Africa.’
But recently several scholars have raised the possibility that the business of supplying the ships in Gorée with victuals and agricultural produce for export was actually a more significant economic activity than trading in relatively cheap slaves. All human life assembled here on this small fortress island: white slavers, prosperous Africans who themselves took part in the slave trade, and even rich slaves who kept slaves of their own years before the first Europeans arrived on the continent. Many slaves at that period quickly converted to Islam, because an edict decreed that no one had the right to enslave a Mohammedan. The fact that today around 80 per cent of Senegalese and 50 per cent of African people as a whole are Muslims reveals quite how intimately and enduringly even religion was bound up with the slave trade in this region.
Our boat was by now entering Gorée Bay. The harbour here consists of little more than an enclosed area of the shore where a boat can put in. In former times, this was also where ships were fitted out for the long transatlantic voyage. Nearby, a market grew up, where gold, ostrich feathers, clothing and wax were traded, and because of the pleasant conditions here, even some freed slaves moved to the island and lived cheek by jowl with their brothers and sisters who were still in bondage.
Many of the ships that unloaded their cargoes here and then took slaves on board came from Liverpool, the European centre of the slave trade. Here, human beings were exchanged for much sought-after European goods, such as textiles, ironware, tools, glass and weapons – all commodities that over time either lost their appeal or prestigious status, with the result that this kind of trade ultimately declined. On the other hand, in certain aristocratic circles, it was deemed a mark of status to own a slave. And then there is the unforgettable story of the Viennese woman from the time of Mozart who had her African husband stuffed when he died and exhibited in a museum – all with his consent.
‘I gather that around a quarter of the three thousand or so people on Gorée Island at that time were mulattos. How come?’ I asked Greta.
‘White women were forbidden from setting foot on the island. So the European masters there took native wives, and in the eyes of the law, the moment these women died or the men returned to Europe, they were considered divorced. So the mulatto offspring remained behind, and mulatto women in particular became important intermediaries between the two cultures. They had their own houses built, and in many cases even took slaves themselves.’
So we duly landed on ground burdened with a heavy historical legacy, setting foot on the sun-warmed cobbles, only shaded here and there by bougainvillea bushes, palms and baobab trees. We glanced up at the houses with their columned porticos, and on the verandas there really were mulatto women, sitting in steamer chairs, with red bougainvillea flowers behind their ears and their eyes closed above their cleavages. The scene is straight out of the novels of Pierre Loti, pure oriental kitsch – or like a glowing canvas by Delacroix set before the distant coastal strip leading to Dakar, with its basalt spoil heaps under a haze of smog.
Sure, you can easily stumble into the miniaturized world of colonialism, captivated by taboo sensations. It really oughtn’t to be so beautiful, this place they call The Dachau of Africa, it shouldn’t blossom in the glare of the sun, and its walls shouldn’t be exuding the aroma of warm volcanic rock. No, the atmosphere simply ought not to be so free and easy, or the romanticism of the empty palaces so lyrical. A museum just shouldn’t be like this, a monument of ‘World Heritage Site’ status, and a place which by common assent is supposed to belong to a closed chapter of history.
There are places which compel the casual tourist not to behave like one anymore. Places where idle rambling just has to cease. Sites of obsession, scenes of pure mania. In short, there are places that evoke involuntary memories through a sequence of inescapable and obtrusive images which detach themselves independently from the firm ground of consciousness, and non-places which generate nothing but oblivion. At present, we can observe the proliferation of such non-places, which are little more than depositories for people.
And it is the places of helplessness, to which no experiences attach and which fulfil no need, which rather feed the urge not to exist. They are sites of obliteration. You don’t need to be conscious in order to have seen them. No engaged look takes them in, no care maintains them, and no history finds its origin here. The traveller finds no access to these places, instead he has to transpose them into a book, a film or a television show, put them in another context. Under these conditions, then, this harbour might not appear just as some squalid little landing place, but rather become the promise of ‘faraway places’. And beyond it would lie the world.
But it is the fate of Gorée, this inescapably African place of human potential, to be the repository of another kind of memory, and if it hadn’t revealed itself so spontaneously, a certain expression on Greta’s face would have sufficed for me to identify the aftershocks it could still cause in the agitation I saw there. That look on her face was haunted by the awareness that human beings were sent to their destruction from here, and that they were intended not just to experience it, but to do so as consciously as possible. They were to be transmuted into the endless here-and-now of their misery, an enduring sense of being present that would coalesce into a proof of their existence: indeed, they could not manage to detach themselves from life, and we later generations now consign them to some notion of a historically remote, almost literary torment.
Yet how can one make it vivid and urgent and real – the pain that went to the very core of their beings, that struck them dumb because it was the prelude to their devastation, and their transformation into nothingness and non-existence; the pain that was like some intrusion of the silence of the grave into their lives? How can we hear it above that screaming pain, that vital, full-throated, demonstrative form of pain they also felt? How might one preserve the motion of passing away against that from which Rousseau (and after him also Nietzsche) claimed language originally derived, namely the motion of the scream, the interjection? Did the dying man have no language? And what impulse toward communication remains when the tortured person wants to proclaim his oneness with his physical body?
We were approaching the heart of the settlement. The Maison des Esclaves, built in 1776–78, is now an exhibition space, showcasing the trade in trafficking human beings, and full of dungeons where slaves were held awaiting transportation. They all passed through here. When Nelson Mandela visited, he insisted on being shut in one of the cells; Pope John Paul II apologized for Christians’ involvement in the slave trade; Bill Clinton just apologized in general, while his wife Hillary had herself photographed by Annie Leibovitz for Elle magazine; and George W. Bush stayed for twenty minutes, during which time he spoke about ‘past wrongs’. But the most compelling act of contrition here was by Brazil’s President Lula, who apologized for his country, which imported more slaves than any other and which only abolished slavery in 1888. The consequences of this have shaped the present: almost half the population of modern Brazil is of African origin.
Anyone who has ever entered the House of Slaves must have done so in a very sombre frame of mind, yet must have been, at the same time, involuntarily touched by the allure of the place, its repellent beauty. The slave owners also lived here in well-appointed and comfortable surroundings on the Piano nobile, which was accessible by a curving external staircase painted in antique pink and looking for all the world like it could have been designed by Antoni Gaudí. From the salon on this floor, beneath the massive wooden ceiling, you can look out through a large window over the balcony to the ocean beyond.
Underneath the Piano nobile, separated by just a few floor-boards and joists, the slaves lived penned in and chained up in crowded conditions. They were only permitted to leave their quarters to work or when they were transported. In their quarters, they waded through a sea of excrement that was only cleared out when it had reached a certain depth. Sometimes these cellars were mucked out, but at other times just sluiced with sea water. Undernourished slaves were literally force-fed with a paste made from beans and palm oil. From time to time, someone would come and drag out the corpses and throw them to the sharks. The terminally sick and the frail were next in line.
Greta stood there in silence, inwardly projecting everything she’d read about this place onto the walls. Gorée attracts lots of visitors, who, drawn by the TV series Roots, come here in search of their ancestry. This series was what first made them aware of the significance of having forbears at all, and then of the fact that they had come from this place. Among the visitors are those who just stand and gaze in wonder, those who have taken on professional assistance to help them trace their roots, people who touch the fabric of the house and claim to ‘recognize’ it, and people who instantly feel that this is their place of origin, who feel at home in a place they have never actually set foot in before. There are also more matter-of-fact visitors, who enter one of the cells and close their eyes, call to mind the images they’ve seen of past times and sincerely believe that they are now bound to be imbued, overwhelmed even, by those last images of Africa that the slaves themselves also saw before being transported.
Greta was taking short, halting steps. She didn’t take any photos or point a video camera at the complex. I wondered what internal images she was storing of the porte sans retour, the ‘door of no return’, through which the wretched slaves walked to get to the ships’ holds. The buyers would have the black ‘ivory’, as they called the slaves, paraded before them so they could examine their muscles, bones, teeth and even assess their mental condition. After the sale was concluded, their bodies were branded, and through the gap afforded by this narrow opening in the wall they could glimpse the open sea. Then they were loaded into the deep bellies of brigs or schooners, vessels that had been specially modified for transporting slaves, with extra decks added to provide more accommodation, though in the process this also created appallingly cramped conditions.
Their hands and legs in shackles, the slaves were herded across a plank into the ship’s hold, where they were first required to unload the cargo the vessel had brought to Gorée, before being shown their place on one of the decks. The excrement and vomit of those working above dropped through onto those lying below. Anyone who could manage it hurled themselves into the sea; many of those who couldn’t despatch themselves in this way died on the transatlantic passage. Less than half of all those who embarked from Gorée ever reached their intended destination on the far side of the Atlantic.
In addition, the slaves were gripped by fear that the Europeans were going to eat them at the conclusion of the crossing. This terror sparked a number of slave revolts, which were reported in a variety of different ways in the eighteenth century. The ringleaders of the very few such uprisings that were staged were publicly tortured to death.
In 1685, Louis XIV of France had enacted the Code Noir, the ‘Black Code’, a measure designed to prevent the unlawful misuse of slaves, yet the way in which this codex was framed only succeeded in legitimizing the degradation of non-European races. In effect, it came to form the legal basis of the slave trade. Although it spelt the end of unlegislated trade of this kind, sadistic and arbitrary cruelty by slavers could scarcely have been more brutal than the hypocritical legality of the codex’s clauses. For example, Article 38 stipulated that a fugitive slave who had been on the run for one month should have both ears cut off and be branded with a fleur-de-lys on one shoulder. If he should manage to escape for another month, he would have his hamstring cut and be branded with a fleur-de-lys on the other shoulder.
But even in regions outside the jurisdiction of the ‘Black Code’, cruelty was no less rife. Nowhere in the world was the ratio of slaves to Europeans as great as in Curaçao, where moral standards became brutalized to a state hitherto unknown. Slaves were whipped till their flesh was raw, and owners were required by law to cut their slaves’ Achilles tendons if they should make any attempt to escape. At the second attempt, one leg would be amputated. Women slaves, on the other hand, were forced to suffer sexual abuse and made to serve guests at banquets while dressed in just a serviette. Their mistresses would show them off as pretty acquisitions and rent them out by the week. If the slaves fled into the jungle, they found Indian bounty hunters waiting for them, who earned a living from hunting down slaves.
However, the official end of slavery did not in any way mean an abrupt cessation of human trafficking. Instead, this period witnessed the growth of so-called ‘freedom villages’, where former slaves would settle in apparent liberty. But in actual fact these settlements were recruitment camps set up by the French to create a pool of indentured labour, which businessmen could draw upon. They would pay a one-off sum, for which former slaves would commit to work for their new masters for anything up to fourteen years. Nor had the motives of the abolitionists at the start of the nineteenth century been entirely selfless, either – much of their involvement in support of the outlawing of slavery was driven primarily by thoughts of their own salvation. In this part of the world, it was only when the first president of the independent Republic of Senegal came to power in 1962 that such activities were done away with entirely. In neighbouring Mauretania, meanwhile, slavery was only officially abolished in 1980.
Nevertheless, Gorée’s decline really set in after the official ban on slavery gained widespread acceptance in 1848. When the end came, Gorée was home to five thousand people, most of whom returned to the mainland after emancipation. A sleepy torpor now settled over the island. The palaces either stood empty or were squatted in by homeless people. Anyone with ambition who wanted to get involved in business or politics left for the mainland, leaving behind on the island a small community of homebodies, old people and invalids – until slavery made a comeback, though this time in the form of nostalgia, in maintaining the museum and preserving the place’s cultural heritage. The island revived once more, in the spirit of this dark legacy. But now it’s really capitalizing on the business of remembrance.
The fact that it enjoys such an idyllic location, criss-crossed by car-free, cobbled, narrow alleys, and that there’s still such a concentration of charming old colonial buildings situated between flowering shrubs under ancient trees, and that wild animals roam free on the island, and that music seems to come from every window, and that it’s home to many artists, either classical painters or avant-garde artists who assemble sculptures or souvenir goods from recycled bits of refuse – all this has made Gorée into a souvenir in its own right, one that you can walk around; a Bohemian attraction, in which all traces of the past have been prettified, diluted and dissipated by this relentless urge to memorialize.
Yet there is another tendency at work here: this time- honoured effort to envision the history of a place where it actually unfolded also renders people amenable to being distracted from the actual scene of events into new forms of remembrance. One effect of constantly being exhorted to feel empathy for what those who suffered went through is the assuaging of our own conscience through his cathartic act. Anyone retrospectively empathizing with the victims cannot possibly be complicit in what the perpetrators did. Thus, the reality that you encounter at sites of remembrance always has something synthetic about it.
The fundamental question posed by all travellers is: ‘Where was I?’ It’s what you’re wont to say when you’ve lost the thread of your story, and it’s also the phrase that springs to mind when you’re trying to pinpoint the thing that made a trip a real experience for you: a look, a building, a situation. But as soon as you’ve visited a memorial, forgetting sets in. However picturesque a place may be, it can also be profane, prosaic. Only in conditions of the very closest spatial proximity do you become aware of the real distance that separates you from what you were looking for; and so it was on this morning, as I wandered through the island of Gorée, which rises lyrically from the sea, and found I could barely contain my sense of joy and foreboding.
In a little shop Greta unearthed a reprint of David Boilat’s Esquisses sénégalaises. In 1853, this artist set about trying to capture the scenery hereabouts. He prints barren landscapes peopled by savages, all of whom have European facial features. It seems as though the Old Masters were incapable of reproducing or accurately portraying the unfamiliar. All they did was colour Europeans brown and give them fuller lips. Not only did they patently fail in their attempt to look beyond themselves and yet still identify something familiar in the exotic, they didn’t even manage to depict what they observed without distorting it. In the same way, Gorée revealed itself to Greta and myself as a place that affected us precisely because it eluded our attempts to grasp it, and yet which in a strange way seemed to approach us once more as we were sitting in the little boat taking us back to Dakar, leaving the island behind us in the gathering mist.
On the coast road to the north, billboards educating people about the dangers of AIDS and churches both proliferate. But the true cathedrals of the Third World are the petrol stations, with their sprawling forecourts, dazzling logos and their streamlined appearance, which makes them look like spaceships that have just descended from orbit. No doubt about it: they’re the great representational buildings of the energy sector.
Pretty much everywhere here, the landscapes are on a vast scale. An isolated tree, a hut roof projecting into the sky, a sand dune – these all serve to emphasize the general flatness of the terrain. Little dust devils whip across the plain, while a group of boys with sticks herd three goats. You’ve constantly got sand grains in your teeth, and even if you close your mouth, it gets in through your nostrils. Severely emaciated horses and goats trot, step by step, along the roadside, their sore eyes gazing fixedly at the barren fields.
The generations and the sexes squat down together in the shadows cast by the round huts, and at the general stores along the way the shelves display a range of goods that have miraculously found their way here: a pile of grubby yellow blocks of curd soap, brightly coloured buckets, alkali batteries, four jam jars full of ratatouille, a plastic gun and a pack of cards. A siren sounds, its pitch growing ever lower until it becomes inaudible, with no one having attended to it. Perhaps all these low-frequency sounds are there all the time throughout the world. It’s the same with goods; they get disseminated to the far end of supply chains and fetch up somewhere in the desert.
Saint-Louis, near the border with Mauretania, thrived until 1902 as the first capital of Senegal. A fort like Gorée, a military stronghold on the coast of what was then Senegambia, this ‘New Orleans of Africa’ – as people came to call the city that grew up on the island between two arms of the Senegal River close to its estuary – experienced periods of boom and bust in quick succession. When this modest place lost its status as capital, the inhabitants of Saint-Louis went out onto the streets waving flags to demand annexation by France. Its prosperous citizens moved to the new capital Dakar, while the old and the poor remained behind. The city’s public buildings were allowed to fall into disrepair, while the private palaces of the rich also went to rack and ruin, the white and ochre-yellow of their façades gradually fading. These two colours eventually merged midway in the spectrum into a dirty indeterminate shade; the complexion of decay.
Senegal’s connection with France goes back to the year 1664, when the French West India Company secured the concession to exploit African colonies in the service of the nation. The town rapidly developed into the most important administrative and commercial settlement in France’s West African Empire, with rubber, cotton, ivory, gold dust, palm oil, coffee and cocoa all being traded here. The slave trade flourished, and civil servants and employees of the great commercial enterprises took up residence in the tile-roofed private villas, with their wrought-iron balconies and their cool inner courtyards. The French merchants and colonial officials consorted with freed female slaves and local women. Before long, Saint-Louis was the most significant French settlement in the whole of Africa, and in truth it really was ideally situated, for it was here where the trade routes to the Atlantic, to Mali and on into the Sahara – great arteries for the movement of both people and goods – all met.
Increasing numbers of merchants thronged to Saint-Louis from France, using it as a springboard for opening up the rest of Africa, mining mineral resources, planting groundnuts and establishing rubber plantations, so further stimulating the traffic of human beings. Saint-Louis became the capital of Senegal in 1840. But just eight years later the slave trade was officially outlawed, leaving France in possession of two slave islands, Gorée and Saint-Louis, but divested of all legal rights to operate them as such. What was to be done? Was the best thing simply to give up and withdraw? But that would be tantamount to capitulating. Accordingly, in response to the aggressive colonial policies of Britain at that time, it was decreed that Saint-Louis should be expanded to become the centre of French West Africa, and as a result, the city became a site of both humanistic high culture and of misery and oppression.
Although slavery had been officially abolished, to all practical intents and purposes it endured for another century. It developed covertly in Saint-Louis, as the position of domestic servant was created to cover all manner of subservient duties – this role was largely unregulated, making it a very attractive proposition for the ruling classes. Thus began a period in which the number of slaves in the city far exceeded that of free men and women.
We found a room in the Hôtel de la Poste, a crumbling building from the colonial era. The hotel was as beautiful as some flamboyant cliché. The veranda, constructed completely out of bamboo, and roofed with straw and with rattan furniture, was managed by a barman wielding a fly-whisk and wearing a red képi; it took him a while to appear at our table, but eventually he served us long drinks in tall glasses with such a passion that you might almost have thought one of the Ten Commandments read: ‘Thou Shalt Make Long Drinks’.
After our drinks, Greta wants to go up and rest in our room. She finds it too hot to go out around midday. We turn off the air-conditioning, though, as it’s too noisy. Instead, we open the bathroom window to try and get a rather faint draught to blow through. Then we lie back naked on the bed, waiting for tiny beads of sweat to form, only just about feeling the airflow, which doesn’t seem to want to move either. Outside the window, four vultures are tussling in a treetop. But even they are going through their lazy routine like they’re in slow motion.
In fact, two distinct districts go to make up Saint-Louis: the coastal area with its administrative buildings, its fading old-style hotels and hidden palazzi, and then – reachable across the Pont Faidherbe – an offshore island, in actual fact more of an extended sandbank with straight alleyways and low houses of a light hue, with wrought iron grilles on the windows, balconies and inner courtyards. But most of them lie empty.
One time we were there, a Muslim dignitary came walking down one of the alleys holding a little boy by the hand. As he passed an abandoned house and read the graffiti on its walls, he shook his head disapprovingly.
‘Don’t go in there,’ he said, ‘a spectre lives there!’ The architecture here is offbeat. There’s rubbish lying around everywhere. Somewhere, rotting carrion is creating a miasma. The better-maintained houses sit in their own compounds; none of them were built directly on the seafront. But some of the flower beds hereabouts are as precise as a Turkish woman’s eyebrows. We stroll through a ruin; in its courtyard, an enormous turtle has become stranded and died. Next to it, there is a tortoise tethered to a chain, hissing furiously and tugging on its shackles. Despite the searing heat of the sand, it refuses to give up.
The part of the island that faces the sea is a slum. The canals in its interior are full of detritus that has long since begun to rot. But its outer fringes are lapped by the foaming surf with its pure white crests. Dugout canoes ride the waves. Some of them, piled high with fish, are being hauled up the beach out of the tide, where men with crates on their heads come running up to carry off the catch.
The architecture in this second part of the island resembles that of the other, only transformed into filth, without any buildings worth speaking of. Instead, standing crumbling amid piles of refuse and abandoned appliances and toys are mean little shacks with chairs where a person can sit or lie down, living organisms with the appearance of rubbish tips. In the sheer variety of forms of decay here, man’s ability to coexist with all the things he needs, consumes and discards has been honed to a fine degree. Symbioses are in evidence everywhere you look.
A girl of about seven sitting on the beach suddenly hoists her dress up above her waist to expose her genitals. Everyone around screams. She didn’t do it for money, she did it for us, proud to call something so beautiful and shocking her own. But when she sees the effect it’s had, she does ask for some money and sulks when she doesn’t get any.
Greta announces that she’s captivated by the ‘dithyrambic’ spirit of the place, by the musicality of its atmosphere and colours, its abundance and indulgence and its sheer exuberance in decay. Even so, the next morning, she wakes up and tells me about a dream she had. When the real world takes on phantasmagoric features, dreams can often feel dull by comparison, and as your day unfolds it can happen that you do little more than log the kaleidoscopic welter of impressions offered by the world outside.
For example, Greta never misses a single animal that crosses our path: not the cranes in the tops of the tallest trees, nor the geckos spiralling up the trunks or pooing in the hotel swimming pool, the black pig rootling around in a little stream of filth, the aardvark galloping over the hill near the market, the dried fish butterflied and hung out to dry like Christ on the cross, the dog lying in the roadside ditch with its ears bloody and weeping open sores, the birds with their unfamiliar cries, the butterflies and their exotic coloration – and all of this at every moment in close proximity to blood, earth, bark, mud, ashes, piss, effluent, secretions, things intrinsic to, bound up with, associated with or related to death, and like everything creaturely with its face turned towards transience – forms that the Western world’s obsession with hygiene has largely effaced.
This is a unique place, for sure, unique also in the way it gathers all its life up into one foaming wave crest and sets it free to dance on the seething Atlantic. All the same, I can’t shake off a feeling of déjà-vu, this impression of a place I’ve visited before, but in a quite different way to the US tourists returning to their roots on Gorée – more immediate, more sensual.
Every morning we venture out once more into the cacophonous atmosphere. Every morning there’s the old man playing the same melody on his goatskin-covered stringed instrument; he continues until we pop a couple of banknotes into the soundhole of his kora. Occasionally, he’ll accompany his playing with chanting that sounds querulous, argumentative and discontented but which is, in fact, all about love – a song that was made up somewhere out in the desert and which sounds somehow wrong when played near a hotel.
Sometimes we’ll stop and listen for a while as a second musician, this time a guitarist, joins in. There’s a captivating simplicity about the tonal interplay between two stringed instruments, enhanced by a recitative voice breaking in. They produce sounds like those heard in nature, only then to conjure up mood pictures that sound like they’ve been painted by the plucking of a mandolin. It’s as if the emotions of the players first have to gain a foothold, and acclimatize themselves, and then can begin to vary, taking on height and depth. Theirs is the quintessential exhilaration of musicians.
‘We never practice,’ says the older musician. ‘Music’s part of my physical constitution, and it makes my spirit grow. We don’t discuss it, we just improvise.’
‘Pure traditional music is a source of truth,’ the other chips in, and launches into a rhapsodic declaration of love for griot, the musical language of the legendary keepers of the oral culture, who preserve the legacy of traditional West African classical music through long song cycles, recitatives and ballads, which among certain noble families are passed down from generation to generation. This music conducts an antiphony with nature. We may not be able to hear it, but it resonates within the inaudible aspects of the music all the same.
We’ve made our way through the detritus, over ditches and down narrow paths, and have not been aware of any curious, outraged or astonished looks directed at us, but rather fixed gazes from watery, weeping eyes, into which any expression, be it of shock or amazement, would only seep very gradually and then remain there. Eyes in which encounters with the unfamiliar would find an invisible reflex, such as can be triggered by encountering death or set off by illnesses that cause flickering vision.
‘If you contract this disease,’ a sufferer from this so-called ‘river blindness’ tells me, ‘the maggots work their way right up to behind your conjunctiva, where they mate and reproduce visibly. That’s when your eyes start shimmering from all the seething activity going on inside them.’
At the market, manpower is no longer on offer, but instead the remnants of European surpluses, Chinese mass production, and cheap manufactured goods from the Far East. Alongside these are the home-produced textile handicrafts, while pharmaceutical products range from modern medicines to indigenous animistic cures. A long line of stalls offers snake heads, songbird beaks, turtles’ feet, lions’ paws, bat heads and the internal organs of crocodiles. Everything is effective in some way or other. There are even animal body parts here which are barely preserved, nor are they embalmed, but instead surrounded by a stench of decay and swarms of flies; the vendors are coy about what beasts they originally came from. They just smile at us and say:
‘Souvenirs.’
There’s even a white man at the Saint-Louis market who performs a routine behind a curtain that involves him baring his expansive white belly and gyrating it to the accompaniment of the Beatles’ song ‘Get Back’. One man is prepared to give him two mangoes for his performance with the one proviso:
‘Just keep your gut covered!’
Someone at my shoulder offers me some product or other. I decline, smiling. Whereupon the man takes my hand.
‘I want to thank you for the polite way you said “no”. It shows me that you’re no racist. Look here, at our two hands, black and white together, that’s how it should be …’
And into my hand he suddenly slides his ‘present’, a silver wire bracelet.
‘And think how lost you would be if you didn’t have this bracelet ready to slip onto your lady’s arm – beautiful as she is – when she was ready and waiting to go out to a club …’
The conditional tenses he uses are spellbinding; they make his little speech so poetic.
But the much-vaunted lady in question, who’s right beside me, interposes a sharp ‘No’. ‘No presents, damn you! Take your rubbish back and clear off!’
Undeterred, he shimmies his considerable bulk up to her, slips the bracelet onto her arm and laughs; half an hour later, she’s still weak at the knees wondering what retribution might befall her for having bought it.
The truth is that the street vendors here aren’t bothered about what people might actually need. Rather, their sole concern is how rich they reckon their customers are. That’s how they end up trying to sell an individual electric hotplate to a backpacker, a crude pair of sunglasses to a glasses wearer, a black wig to a blonde woman, and black shoe polish to someone wearing suede shoes. After all, don’t these foreigners have the wherewithal to buy all this stuff?
When we turn down the chance of buying ourselves some fans, the saleswoman, who has a huge iridescent fly perched on a wart on her upper lip, calls after us:
‘Don’t think you can forget me that easily. I’ll appear to you one day and you’ll cry … you’ll found a village that’s always shrouded in darkness … You should … ’
And so it goes on. Finally, our resistance worn down and we buy a bottle of bissap – a watery, dark red juice that tastes of tea and fruit combined – and a bundle of teeth-cleaning sticks.
‘I’ll give you a sweet for the mature lady!’ a lad shouts out. His sales pitch persuades me to buy the sweet.
Then there’s the seven-year-old mouth-organ salesman, draped all over with instruments. He’s carrying one in his mouth, one in his hand and one in a box. Every time someone turns him down, he sighs into the harmonica in his mouth. It sounds like the blues, or a collection of blue notes that have been waiting patiently in the mouth organ precisely for that moment of disappointment.
Yet amid all this chorus of itinerant salesmen, market traders, canvassers and guides, I still can’t shake off my sense of déjàvu. But it’s not Gorée, or the slave trade architecture, or the legacy of the exploiters, human traffickers, colonial masters and oppressors that’s making all this seem so familiar and inevitable. It’s something else which I can’t put my finger on.
Sitting alone on the hotel veranda, looking down on the street, I can observe the basic modes of local life. People here organize themselves into personal microstructures. They don’t consume in any centralized fashion, but go from shop to shop, nor do they think in a centralized way, but go straight from the church to the local soothsayer and then on to the totem seller. They create vertical systems, with farmers employing farmers and nursemaids having nursemaids of their own …
A delegation of boys who guide blind people appears in front of the veranda. After them come the footballers from the prostitutes’ quarter. And then the match sellers announce themselves:
‘Isn’t it us that you’ve been keeping an eye out for all this while? Well, here we are! Un cadeau, please, un cadeau!’
The hotelier shoos them all away with his feather duster.
‘I beg your pardon, monsieur,’ he says before adding – no word of a lie – ‘they’re the descendants of slaves.’
That may well be so, I tell him. But, I continue, nowhere has the memory of slavery gripped and unsettled me like it has in Gorée, the centre of the African slave trade. And it’s absolutely true: in the Maison des Esclaves, we’d been reduced to silence, as had our fellow visitors, who’d just stood there, overcome by the injustice, the martyrdom and the thought of the terrible voyage …
The hotel owner gives an ironic smile, and then addresses me in all earnest, as soberly as any academic:
‘Écoutez, I don’t want to disappoint you, and you’ve experienced what you’ve experienced. Also, there’s nothing we can do about it, but American and French researchers have suggested that Gorée didn’t actually play an significant part in the slave trade at all.’
‘But there’s all this talk about millions of slaves being shipped from here, and of the “Dachau of Black Africa”!’
‘Yeah, those researchers have been publicly denounced here as “Holocaust deniers”, but there’s no denying their theories were based on sound evidence. Between 1700 and 1850, only just over 427,000 slaves were transported through Gorée.’
‘So what does that mean?’
‘It means we’re talking about less than 5 per cent of the total slave trade! So, in contrast to Saint-Louis, say, Gorée was, if I can put it like this, a relatively unimportant “source of supply”.’ I could have replied that that was an obscene statistic, could have trotted out the customary cliché about figures telling us nothing about people and their experiences and suffering; I could have advanced arguments about families being split up and enforced deportation, mentioned the phrase ‘individual fates’, or asked what it meant to him to live in the capital of slave deportation. I could also have asked myself why I’d followed this remembrance trail in Gorée and not in Saint-Louis, where there was no such slavery commemoration industry. I could have considered whether the idyll of the world heritage site somehow kitschified my act of commemoration, whereas the plain, unattractive presence of African poverty in Saint-Louis hadn’t even prompted me to memorialize slavery in the first place.
But instead I just nodded to him in parting, disabused and chastened, rose from my bamboo chair and wandered back inside the hotel, where I was drawn in passing to a small framed photograph hanging on the flower-pattern wallpaper. The first person I recognized in it was Philippe Noiret, then Stéphane Audran, and then the rest. It turned out that Bertrand Tavernier had shot his film Coup de Torchon here in 1980. That was all I needed. The first port of call for memory isn’t real history, but the cinema. I was still standing in the corridor looking at the photo when Greta appeared and announced:
‘You won’t believe the dream I just had! Well …’