THE SLAVE TRADING ISLAND OF GOREE!! WHERE MORE THAN 20 MILLION SLAVES WERE TRADED!!
Gorée’s location afforded it healthy mercantile appeal, providing an off-land base for the export of West African goods, such as peanuts, beeswax and grain to Europe and the Americas. However, Gorée is largely remembered for its role in West Africa’s most infamous export: slaves.
UNESCO claims that “from the 15th to 19th century, Gorée was the largest slave trading centre on the African coast” with an estimated 20 million slaves passing through the island between 1536 and 1848. Some historians have downplayed the numbers, but there is no denying that for many Africans, Ile Gorée was the last part of their continent they would ever see.
Being the nearest point to the Americas, slaves were brought from across West Africa – with the supposed strongest coming from Ghana. Many were sold by local tribes. Others bought and taken by European colonialists. None came of their own free will. It was until 1848 that slave trading was made illegal in Senegal – 312 years after the trade began under the Portuguese.
Gorée was one of the first European settlements in West Africa, with the Portuguese being the first to plant their flag on the previously uninhabited rock it would then change
hands more times than it may care to imagine, yo-yoing at first between the Portuguese and Dutch – who named the island ‘Goe-Ree’ (Good Harbour) – before the British and French began the same tit-for-tat dance.
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