Unique place, this small island of Senegal has a crazy charm with its pastel houses, its restaurants, but this refuge of relaxation with its "House of the slaves" reminds us the role of Gorée in the past and the sufferings of the slave trade.
Gorée and its history
Today Gorée has become an unmissable tourist place of Senegal due to its role during the slave trade.
If Gorée is represented as a symbolic place in the history of slavery, it is rather because it still remains today one of the places where one can still find traces of this tragic era. A guided tour of this house of slaves plunges you directly into the deplorable history of the slave trade. Discovering this majestic island is as moving as it is instructive.
The Portuguese navigator Dinis Dias reached the island of Gorée in 1444, which he named "Palma". The Dutch seize Gorée in 1617. In 1677 the French seize the island.
The slave trade lasted for three centuries on the African coasts (the Gambia, Saint-Louis of Senegal, Benin, Ghana ...). The slave trade continued for three centuries on the African coasts (the Gambia, Saint-Louis of Senegal, Benin, Ghana, etc.). The concentration centers of African slaves departing for America are mainly located in Saint-Louis, the convergence point of the Arab-Muslim and European neighbour- hood latrait. In Gorée, Anna Colas Pépin's (formerly the niece of Anne Pépin), known throughout the world as the House of Slaves, is a place more symbolic than historical. Indeed, the passage of the slaves by Gorée was very minority between 900 and 1500 people according to the American historian Philip Curtin. The owners of the slave villages on the continent where the captives were stored were the Wolof Kings of Cayor and the Toucouleur Kings of the Senegal River.
At the National Archives of France, rue Soubise in Paris, as well as at the Bibliothèque Nationale François Mitterrand, we find information about these slave kings and the macabre accounting of this trade. The Kings of Cayor nevertheless encountered a strong resistance of the Lebous and Serer populations of the small coast of Senegal described as peoples refusing to sell slaves by the navigator Alvise Cadamosto from the beginning of the fifteenth century.
In 1872 the French colonial administration created the two communes of Saint-Louis and Gorée, the first two communes of West Africa on the Western model, with exactly the same status as the other French communes.
As early as 1887, Dakar was detached from the commune of Gorée and became a full-fledged commune. The town of Gorée is reduced to its small island. In 1891 the population of Gorée is 2,100 inhabitants, while Dakar has only 8,737. However, in 1926 the Goran people are only 700, while the population of Dakar reaches 33,679. Thus, the merger of Gorée with Dakar was decided in 1929. The town of Gorée disappears and Gorée is now a small island in the commune of Dakar. Lieutenant Robert Gaffiot published in 1933 a work whose title reflects this decommissioning: Gorée, capital fallen.
Become a place of passage and contemplation the island of Gorée welcomes every year thousands of tourists. The island also received some of the world's major visitors on official visits to Senegal (John Paul II, Bill Clinton, George Walker Bush, Yasser Arafat ...)
Places of interest in Gorée:
The House of Slaves:
Established in 1776, the House of Slaves is the obligatory passage of anyone who visits Gorée for the first time. The real role of the famous pink house - and more generally of the island - in the slave trade has been denounced for several years as belonging to the "myth".
Built by the Portuguese, the first Europeans to tread the soil of the island in 1444, this house would have been the last slave dated in Gorée.
On the ground floor are the cells (Men, Children, Weighing Chamber, girls, temporary unfit). In the men's rooms, each 2.60 m by 2.60 m, up to 15-20 people were seated with their backs against the wall, chains holding them to the neck and arms. They were released only once a day to enable them to satisfy their needs, generally in this house, where they lived in an unbearable state of hygiene. The population in this small house varied between 150 and 200 slaves. The waiting period sometimes lasted nearly three months. These slaves have to do to sailboats for transport. In this house, the father, mother and child in the cells were separated.
The Historical Museum:
Located on the northern tip of the island, the Historical Museum - attached to the Black African Fundamental Institute (IFAN) - occupies the ancient Fort of Es
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