On the western tip of Africa, an old slave trading port in Senegal sits at the heart of an emotional pilgrimage for many Americans.
I made my own way one August morning to the ferry docks, not sure what emotions I would feel when I landed on Goree Island. I felt that my identity as an American born to the son of Chinese immigrants was linked in some way by history to the slave port, though I couldn’t articulate it yet. For most of my life, I had claimed my Americanness without fully understanding what it meant. I began to gain some wisdom only after I left California and lived abroad. Over the last two years, I celebrated the Chinese New Year in the little southern village where my grandpa was born and visited the Vietnamese property where my other grandpa grew up. That was my personal family history. To take the next step in knowing my identity, I had to cut to the scene of the origin of America to understand what else I had inherited from the past.
In Dakar, a tall security guard stopped me at the gate. He asked me for my passport, and I froze. I didn’t know I was supposed to bring it. I showed him a folded-up, wrinkly paper copy of my passport. He refused to accept it, but I sensed there was leniency. A stocky man rushed up to my side and pulled his lanyard badge away from his chest like someone showing off a medal. He spoke to me in French. He was an official tour guide, and for the standard price of 8,000 West African francs, he could get me in with no passport. He waved at the guard, who didn’t react, and we walked right in.
We now know that part of the story about Goree Island is a myth. Since the mid-1990s, Africa scholars and journalists have debunked claims of the island’s outsized importance to the Atlantic slave trade. The UNESCO heritage website states that “from the 15th to the 19th century, it was the largest slave-trading centre on the African coast.” But according to sources, one estimate figures 33,000 slaves were shipped through Goree, out of the 12.5 million Africans sold to the New World over three centuries. It’s not clear how many slaves from Goree ended up on American soil, as opposed to the Caribbean or South America. What became clear to me is the emotional power of its symbolism today.
My tour guide sped ahead of the crowds and jerked his palm at me in a scooping motion to hurry up. We were one of the first on the boat, and he told me to slide quickly onto a seat on the upper deck. It had the best views of the island as we slowly approached. When we arrived, we walked down paths shaded by lush green palms next to sunny yellow and dusty pink buildings. It was quiet and peaceful, because cars are banned from the island. By the wayside of one of the cobblestoned paths, there was a standalone red building called Maison des Esclaves, or House of Slaves. And at the back of this house, there was an ominous-looking, ocean-facing door called “la porte du voyage sans retour,” or, the door to a journey of no return.
Prominent world leaders, including presidents Clinton, Bush Jr. and Obama, Nelson Mandela, and Pope John Paul II, have stood at this doorway. News photos showed their solemn faces staring into the distance, and their presence seemed to add weight to the gravitas of this site. On my tour, my guide emphasized the misery of slave living conditions. He led me to rooms where he said women, young girls, children and men were split up from each other and locked in chains. He said that if slaves died, their bodies would be fed to the sharks. In the darkness of the corridor, the door of no return looked dramatic as it was backlit by the sun. It looked like the only way out of that place. My tour guide said this was the last point on land for slaves before they were sent on a boat for some final destination of bondage. Then he took me upstairs to see the quarters of white slave masters and artifacts of old manacles and guns encased in glass boxes.
At the time, I was very moved by the museum displays. I wasn’t aware yet that the building was the subject of a statistics debate, but I don’t think that mattered. I wanted to offer the site of slavery its due respect. I peeked into the bare rooms that I was told were holding cells and, in my mind, I traced the connections from the suffering there to the suffering in the American colonies and the suffering from inequality today. I thought about what author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie wrote in her book “Americanah,” that Africans “became black” in America. That when Africans come to our country, they suddenly become judged first not as any other person, but first by the color of their skin. It’s an alien concept to them back in their home country, but an insidious, regular part of American life. I thought about the broader environment of hate against people of color that has persisted. I wondered how I was a part of this story too.
Out of the 10.7 million slaves who survived the voyage from Africa to the Americas, by one scholar’s estimate approximately 450,000 slaves from various regions in Africa made it to the colonies of the United States. Twenty slaves arrived on the shores of Virginia in 1619, a year that has been recognized as the beginning of America’s original sin. Over the course of the next four centuries, the descendants of those slaves and their allies fought for freedom from slavery and from apartheid with their lives. In doing so, as Nikole Hannah-Jones writes for the New York Times magazine, they held America accountable to its ideals of protecting freedom and equality for all people, and they strived to make the aspiration of such ideals a reality. Those who’ve come to America in search of a better life have benefited from civil rights movements spearheaded by African Americans, including my own family.
The original property deed of my parents’ home in western San Jose, which was built in 1959, restricted Asians from living in that neighborhood. “Redlining” – or the practice of declining housing loans to non-whites – was still in force at the time of our home’s construction. But things had changed by the time my parents bought the property. In the 1960s, Byron Rumford, the first African American elected to public office in northern California, led a successful campaign to pass a state bill for fair housing. And in 1967, the United States Supreme Court upheld a state court ruling that overturned a discriminatory California proposition. (The referendum would have allowed property owners to keep refusing to sell or rent out housing to someone simply because of their race.) So in the 1980s, when my parents, who are both of Chinese descent, bought their Silicon Valley home with a big tree in the front yard, they were not denied a mortgage because of their race, despite whatever the deed said. I was a one-year-old baby when they moved into that quiet suburban tract next to a good public elementary school. We stayed there for my entire childhood and stored up good memories, but it was also a good financial investment. The value of that home tripled since my parents moved in. By Zillow’s estimate, it’s now worth about $1.5 million.
In many ways, Goree Island in Senegal has taken on a new meaning. The island has become more than a debate about numbers. It’s become a place of return for the African diaspora to personally reconnect with their heritage. And the Door of No Return itself has become a symbol of both an exit and an entrance for lessons learned from history. It’s become a reminder that have a responsibility both to revisit the past and grieve over its cruelties, as well as to step forward, to reckon with how slavery has affected our society today in forms of discrimination, and to work together to eliminate it.
This process of remembering is taking root. This year, Ghana promoted a Year of Return campaign, including commemorations of black writers and an emancipation day of healing, to welcome the diaspora back to Africa. Recently, the NYT magazine’s 1619 Project published a series of essays to spread awareness about slavery’s deep impact on America. After I reflected on my visit to Goree Island, I felt compelled to investigate how my family was helped by the struggle to heal from the scars of slavery. Our benefit was proof to me that the ideals of America don’t belong to just one group, and that affording rights to a marginalized group doesn’t take something away from everyone else. When African Americans fought for equality, they guaranteed it for us all. I walked away from Goree Island with the hope that we — a collective we, not a we split up by tribes — can keep working together to really live the way we say we’re supposed to be. That is a message that all Americans can take home.
