Island of Stolen Souls

AFRICAN-AMERICANS ARE RETURNING TO AFRICA TO CONFRONT SLAVERY'S UGLY PAST

Standing in the Slave House on Goree Island off the coast of Senegal, where millions of African slaves saw their homeland for the last time before being shipped to America, Karen Finney wept.

"It broke us all down, just the brutality of it," Finney recalls. "I have been there twice and each time it ripped into my heart."

Finney, 32, is one of thousands of African-Americans who are traveling to Africa in an attempt to go back to a home they've never seen. With its stark, stone slave quarters, and the haunting "Door of No Return" facing the ocean where the imprisoned Africans were herded onto slave ships, Goree Island has become the central pilgrimage site for a growing trend of roots tourism to Africa. Inescapably, the travellers end up having an emotional confrontation with the ghosts of slavery.

"You have to see it, and then make peace with it," says Finney, who works as a political aide to First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton. "Africa is part of who I am. I don't know if my family came from East or West Africa, but I had to touch that part of where I came from. I have Irish friends who have gone back to Ireland, and Jewish friends who have traveled to Israel. They know where they came from."

The trend toward finding where you came from in Africa is still small by world travel standards. About 25 million people visited the continent of Africa in 1998, while Orlando, Florida, alone attracted 36 million that same year. But travel to Africa is steadily increasing. Commerce Department figures show that half a million Americans visited Africa this year, double the number of 10 years ago, though the majority of tourists go to explore wild game parks rather than their own heritage.

But Goree (guh-RAY) Island, along with several sites in Ghana and Zambia, has become a popular destination for roots tours. Kate Doty, director of Africa tours for San Francisco-based Global Expeditions, says her agency's bookings have increased dramatically in the last year. She says her groups are often mixed, both African-Americans and whites.

Easy access to information--more than 2,500 Web sites are devoted to African travel and genealogy--has contributed to the surge in travel there.

Goree Island was the dramatic backdrop chosen by President Clinton when he apologized for slavery during his tour to Africa in 1998.

A SYMBOL OF THE SLAVE TRADE

One reason Goree Island has become the symbol of African-heritage tours is that most other African countries haven't put the resources into refurbishing the remnants of the slave trade that Senegal has. In fact, historians estimate that only 13 percent of the slaves taken to North America came from Senegal and Gambia. Nearly half came from Nigeria and Angola, which have no real roots tourism.

The Reverend Dwight Gill led two dozen of his parishioners to Senegal from the New Hope Baptist Church of East Orange, New Jersey. "It was the trip of a lifetime," he says.

Betsy Peoples traveled with members of her Temple Hills, Maryland, church group to celebrate the dedication of a new chapel at a middle school in Accra, Ghana's capital. "Many African-Americans often talk about visiting `The Motherland,'" Peoples writes in a first-person account of her trip in Emerge, an African-American news magazine, "but once you've done it, history takes on a new perspective. To be an African-American standing on the grounds where millions of Africans were enslaved and shipped to distant lands is confirmation that their prayers to someday return nave been answered."

Finney says she was powerfully affected by being in Africa, seeing portraits of black people on the local currency, and realizing that she was in the majority for the first time in her life. And she feels grateful to her ancestors for having survived the hellish journey to America.

But what remains with her most is the sight of the silhouetted doorway onto the ocean at Goree, where the slaves departed for their torturous passage across the Atlantic. "What strikes you is the Door of No Return," she says. "The ships would pull up and planks would be lowered to that door, and there is nothing but the vastness of the ocean in front of you. You can't imagine what was going through the minds of the people as they were standing at that door before getting on the boat. The guides told us the island is surrounded by sharks, attracted there by the numbers of people who tried to escape by jumping into the sea. And I wondered whether I would have jumped too."

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