Family Tour to Senegal, West Africa – Goree Island
Impressions of Senegal, West Africa
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(Originally written in 2001 as a local news article)
Standing in the “Doorway of No Return,” at the infamous slave house on the island of Goree, Donnell Floyd, Jr. contemplated the importance his journey to West Africa. While a new car for graduation would have been nice, nothing, really, could be as meaningful as this trip to Dakar, Senegal – the gift his parents chose to give him for graduating from Riverdale Baptist High school in June. It was the same gift his father received from his mother upon graduating from Duke Ellington School of the Arts in 1983.
Doorway of No Return, in the "House of Slaves", on the island of Goree, Dakar, Senegal
Donnell, Jr., along with eleven family members and friends, boarded an Air Afrique Airlines plane to Dakar for the seven-day pilgrimage to West Africa. The tour package, promoted by New York-based Alken Travel, is particularly attractive to African-Americans looking to reconnect with their ancestral homeland.
“Before I got here basically, my mind was going in the direction of what America has always taught me to think, that they’re not really like us, they’re different, and all the other crazy little stereotypes that we put on them in America,” Donnell said. “But I knew it would be different. It’s even quite the opposite.”
Being greeted by Africans welcoming Black Americans at the airport was particularly exciting said Donnell. “I really like that because I feel like Michael Jordan. You go to America, and they really don’t even care.”
Donnell said he marveled at the persistence, assertiveness, and enthusiasm of the craftsmen bartering goods in the markets.
In retail stores in America, Donnell said, he felt as though the clerks really didn’t’ care if he purchased anything. “Really, they would probably send someone around to make sure you don’t steal anything, especially for me, because they’ll watch me as I walk around the store.
As an example, he noted that one member of the group offered to count out her money for a craftsman as she made her purchases, and the vendor responded, it’s okay, I trust you, you’re my sister.
“You will never hear that in America,” he said. “You will never hear that.”
Indeed, Africans and African-Americans alike are still paying for the consequences of an industry in “human beings” as objects that helped to secure the early development of the United States.
“It was the scale of force exerted by the Atlantic trade which changed in the late seventeenth century,” writes James F. Searing, a noted scholar, in his book West African slavery and Atlantic Commerce. “The great Atlantic powers, Britain and France, competed directly for the slaves of the Senegambia for most of the 18th century, throwing not only their economic might, but also the power of their naval fleets into the balance. The struggle of France and Britain for hegemony in the Atlantic world had an important impact on Senegambian history, but far more important was the sheer volume of the eighteenth century slave trade, whose demand for African labor was insatiable.”
The colony of Maryland received shipments of slaves from transport vessels such as the ship Khouli Kan, which left Angola in August 1750 with a cargo of 420 human and delivered 384 slaves months later. In 1686, the ship Speedwell left from the Senegambia with a cargo of 217 captured Africans, and arrived in Maryland with 189 remaining. Records of these and other voyages, documented by scholars, are now available on a CD-ROM published by Cambridge University Press. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database contains the records of more than 27,000 voyages of ships that transported slaves between 1527 and 1866. Scholars at Harvard University’s W.E.B. Dubois Institute compiled the database.
For Vanessa Abernathy, (Donnell’s aunt) the visit to the House of Slaves on Goree Island and the experience of entire trip left her with a greater awareness of the connection between the African and African-American. It was the economic disparity between the affluent and the poverty of most of the population that was most striking to her. “I know that there are all kinds of other influences here and it reminds me so much of gentrification in the United States,” said Ms. Abernathy. “I think there is a lot of work that we have to do. I think we need to do two things: Number one we have to always realize that whether we like it or not we [African-Americans] are part of the vanguard of their [African] economic empowerment. You know how in the sixties it was political empowerment, but now here we are in the year 2000 and it’s got to be about global economic empowerment.
“I think that we have a spiritual and moral responsibility to make sure that there is justice world wide for African people and the other part to that is that we have to make sure that there is economic opportunity for Africans world wide and that is a major struggle,” she said. “It’s not going to be completed overnight. When we deal with economics on the continent of Africa, we have to be as just with Africans as we would want any body else to be. We have to be the leadership on that. We cannot be about exploitation. And that’s going to be a challenge to all of us because it is very easy to exploit people, but I always believe that you can reap negative karma from exploitation.”
Like Vanessa, his graduation gift resulted in a greater awareness of his connection to the African continent. “My father asked all of us how long we could stay here. I said a year, because I actually like it here,” he said. “They don’t have all the perks of America, but the people are real and genuine, unlike in America where they use you to get ahead. The children are eager. They are eager and they are just waiting for the chance that they may not even get, but they are still working for it their whole lives, where as in America, we have choices every day that they will never have.