How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

by Clint Smith

Eloi told me that the island was not originally a place Europeans intended to use to capture and sell enslaved Africans. As I had read, Gorée was coveted by European nations because of its strategic value as a trading post for the alleged trove of resources in West Africa. “The purpose was not to find slaves,” he said. “The purpose was discovery. “Many of the other European nations came to Gorée Island to fight each other, just so they could occupy the place,” he told me. It wasn’t until the inception of slavery in the Americas, Eloi said, that the purpose of Gorée Island changed. “After the discovery of America, because of the development of sugarcane plantations, cotton, coffee, rice cultivation, they forced the [Native Americans] to work for them. And it was because the Natives died in great number that they turned to Africa, and the purpose was to replace these Natives with Africans.” As slavery became central to the economic prosperity of the United States, increasing numbers of Africans were imported from the Senegambia region. I thought back to something Yvonne Holden had told me during my tour of the Whitney Plantation, how many of the enslaved people in southern Louisiana were from the Senegambia region and how they possessed specific knowledge about cultivating rice and indigo seeds.