The Ends of the Earth

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by Willemsen, Roger; Lewis, Peter;


  ‘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.

 

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