A trip to the Senegalese Island of Gorée

The Senegalese island of Gorée is considered the most famous tourist island in Africa. It draws its importance from being geographically shaped like the map of Africa, bearing typical resemblance if seen from above. The other reason behind Gorée’s fame is that it had been the major port competed for by colonizers and later used in slave trade that was widespread, especially in the United States and Europe.
The African guide took me to that wonderful island where I spent nearly thirty days. This photo of mine was taken by my teacher, professor of African languages from inside the African Detention Center and in front of the famous gate called “Door of No Return”, a gate that got famous because of the numbers of Africans forcibly deported to the United States and Europe centuries ago.

I roamed the ins and outs of this building and saw how its cellars were built. Those cellars would be cruel even on inanimate objects if confined in, let alone humans. Strangely, there happened to be cellars allocated for children, others for women and others for men; my African guide told me that the colonizers adopted a certain plan that dictates sending men to Europe, his wife to the US, and children to an unknown place in order not to be identified in the future.
I carefully thought of all that, and went on to feel the silent, dismal walls, as if hearing them voicing their witness of unprecedented horrors in human history.