Last week, the Obamas peered out of the Door of No Return, a part of Goree Island’s House of Slaves where, the story goes, “Africans were held before going through the door and being shipped off the continent as slaves.” Max Fisher discovers that the site’s history isn’t so straightforward:
If you ask the stewards of this museum on Goree Island what happened there, they’ll likely refer you to the plaques on the wall, which say that millions of slaves passed through the building that Obama visited Thursday, now called the House of Slaves. … But if you ask Africa scholars, they’ll tell you a very different story. “There are literally no historians who believe the Slave House is what they’re claiming it to be, or that believe Goree was statistically significant in terms of the slave trade,” Ralph Austen, who as a professor emeritus at the University of Chicago has written several academic articles on the subject, told the Associated Press.
But door remains an important landmark regardless:
Katharina Schramm, in a book on the role of history in African ideologies today, called the Door of No Return a symbol of “the cultural amnesia and sense of disconnection that slavery and the Middle Passage stand for.” The door, she wrote, has become increasingly associated not just with its largely fictional past but with its very real present as a place of historical “healing and closure,” sometimes now described as a “Door of Return” out of slavery’s shadow.
Historical anthropologist François Richard adds his thoughts:
Some people use the history/memory couplet to parse the problem of Gorée’s house of slaves (i.e., history concerned with facts and memory with symbolic value and historical gravity, a mode of affective resonance absolutely central to identities in the African diaspora). It’s not the most satisfying or cutting way of analyzing the phenomenon, but it has the merit of offering a point of entry. What ‘s important to remember, though, is that while the details about the house may not be entirely exact, they do speak to a deeper historical truth – namely, the experience and infamy of turning humanity into a commodity.
The Dish 