 Boubacar Joseph Ndiaye (15 October 1922 - 6 February 2009) was as the "curator" of the Slave House on Gorée Island (Senegal) [1]. He remains a figure best known Senegalese in the world, including tourists, although recent scientific work on the slave trade and the history of the island led to recover his passion in perspective.
Born into a family of goréenne, Boubacar Joseph Ndiaye was born on 15 October 1922 in Rufisque (Senegal). He completed his primary education in Gorée, then joined the Professional School Pinet-Laprade Dakar. He then worked as a composer-typographer.
Called up for military service in the French Army in 1943, he participated in the liberation of France with the French army.
He participated in the Battle of Monte Cassino as tirailleur Senegal.
NCO skydiver, he also served in the Far East, in the first half-brigade of parachute commandos Colonial.
Veteran 1939-45 and Croix de Guerre, Officier de l'Ordre National du Lion, Chevalier de l'Ordre National du Mérite, Chevalier of the Order of Merit of Senegal.
He was appointed curator of the Slave House on Gorée in 1962 and will exercise this function until his death.
He died in Dakar on 6 February 2009 at the age of 87 years [2] after a long illness and is based in the cemetery Layène Cambérène Dakar.
For four decades, charisma - not devoid of humor to the occasion - the master of the house leaves no visitor indifferent, every time he tells the daily hell of slaves who were held in this place claim, before 'bluntly be shipped to the New World where others were waiting vicissitudes. Gorée, in his narrative becomes a hub of the slave trade, any statement inconsistent with the history of the slave trade.
 Several studies have questioned in detail the story fervently defended by Joseph Ndiaye: the slaves who passed through the island only a fraction of the whole of the slave trade and the home called House of Slaves built for use by wealthy mestizo, for its part has never housed slave trafficking. An article by Emmanuel de Roux in the French daily Le Monde, "The myth of the House of slaves who resists reality" has generated some stir by revealing these facts beyond the community of specialists.
Another controversy erupted about the real paternity of Joseph Ndiaye book for children, it was a Goree day ....
Thanks to the determination of Joseph Ndiaye, the famous house was nevertheless restored by UNESCO in 1990 and many still agree to recognize the value of a place of memory, even if it is more symbolic than history.
The House of Slaves was reconstructed and opened in as a museum in 1962 largely through the work of Boubacar Joseph Ndiaye, who was a tireless advocate of both the memorial and the belief in that slaves were held in the building in great numbers and from here transported directly to the Americas.[2] Eventually becoming curator of the Museum, Ndiaye has claimed that more than a million slaves passed through the doors of the house. This belief has made the house both a tourist attraction, and the site for dozens of state visits by world leaders to Senegal.
Since the 1980s, academics have downplayed the role that Goree played in the Atlantic Slave Trade, arguing that it is unlikely that many slaves actually walked through the door, and that Goree itself was marginal to the Atlantic slave trade. Ndiaye and other Senegalese have always maintained that the the site was more than a memorial but an actual historic site in the transport of Africans to French, Spanish, Dutch, and Portuguese colonies of the Americas, and thus undercounted by Anglophone researchers.
Built around 1776, the building was the home in the early 19th century to one of a class wealthy colonial Senegalese Metis woman trader (t
he Signares), Anna Colas Pépin. Researchers argue that while the houseowner may have sold small numbers of slaves (kept in the now reconstructed basement cells) and kept a few domestic slaves, the actual point of departure was 300m away at a fort on the beach. The house has been restored since the 1970s. Despite the shrine-like status of Goree Island, historians have argued only 26,000 enslaved Africans were recorded having passed through the island, of the 12 million slaves that were abducted from Africa. Ndaiye and supporters have argued that there is evidence that the building itself was earlier, was built purposefully to hold large numbers of slaves, and that as many as 15 million people passed through this particular Door of No Return.
Academic accounts, such as the 1969 statistical work of historian Philip D. Curtin, argue that exports from Goree began about 1670 and continued till about 1810, at no time more than 200 to 300 a year in important years and none at all in others. Curtin's 1969 accounting of slave trade statistics records that between 1711 and 1810 180,000 enslaved Africans were transported from the French posts in Senegambia, most being transported from Saint-Louis, Senegal and James Fort in modern Gambia Curtin has been quoted that the actual doorway memorialised likely had no historical significance In response to these figure, popularly rejected my much of the Senegalese public, an African historical conference in 1998 claimed that records from the French trading houses of Nantes documented 103,000 slaves being from Goree on Nantes owned ships in a single year in the 18th century.
Even those who argue Goree was never important in the slave trade view the island as an important memorial to a trade that was carried on in greater scale from ports in modern Ghana and Benin. |
