The incredible quest to find the African slave ships that sank in the Atlantic

By Kevin Sieff



Student Adama Athie, left, sits next to Ibrahima Thiaw, 50, center, and fellow students, Djidere Balde, Madick Gueye, Pape Leity Diop and Aicha Kamite off the shore of Goree Island in Dakar, Senegal in May. (Jane Hahn/For The Washington Post)

OFF THE COAST OF DAKAR, SENEGAL — The archaeologist rose in the bow of the speedboat, pointing to the choppy waters where the 18th-century slave ship had gone down. “It’s somewhere over there,” Ibrahima Thiaw said. Off the western tip of mainland Africa lie some of the most important vestiges of the transatlantic slave trade: the wreckage of ships that sank, carrying thousands of African men, women and children to America. But despite historians’ immense interest in that period, no one has ever tried to excavate them. Until now.

For years, the wrecks were considered too hard to find. The work was too expensive. And there were few African researchers willing to take on the project in countries where the slave trade is often considered a source of shame — not a subject worthy of study. Thiaw, a tall-50-year-old archaeologist from rural Senegal, is one of the pioneers trying to find the wrecks. There has been only one known excavation of a ship that went down off the African coast while carrying slaves — the São José, found thousands of miles away, off South Africa. Artifacts from the vessel will be displayed at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, opening next month. Thiaw hopes his discoveries will eventually be featured by the museum, too.

“The stories that will help us understand the slave trade, this crucial moment in human history, are down there,” Thiaw said, gazing from the boat into the Atlantic Ocean as he began the search on a bright day in May. But as he would discover over the following months, it wouldn’t be easy. Senegal was a major exporter of slaves for about 400 years. When Thiaw was in school, though, that history was barely discussed. As a boy, he visited Goree Island, just off the coast of Dakar, where a tour guide told him about the slaves waiting, shackled, for boats headed for the Americas. “After listening to him,” he recalled, “I screamed.” It was the beginning of an obsession. His parents were farmers, but Thiaw decided to be an archaeologist, studying at the University of Dakar and then earning a PhD at Rice University in Houston. Some of his friends and family joked that he was “searching for garbage.”

Senegal had became known worldwide for its landmarks of the slave trade, particularly on Goree, a major entrepot, or trading center. But the scholarship turned out to be shaky. In the 1990s, American researchers claimed that those sites had been misidentified. The famed “Door of No Return” was not in fact a final departure point for slaves, they said, but likely just a door in a private residence. For Thiaw, the controversy reinforced his commitment to archaeological research.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/africa/the-incredible-quest-to-find-the-african-slave-ships-that-sank-in-the-atlantic/2016/08/17/25dd6080-cf5b-46e0-b896-ea0512311bdd_story.html