By: Ferdinand de Jong

On the 6th of January 2024, the Senegalese President Macky Sall laid the first stone for the Memorial of Gorée in Senegal’s capital, Dakar. “A site of respect, meditation and reflexion,” is how the Senegalese President qualified the monument that should remember the slave trade that was conducted at the Island of Gorée. For three centuries, slave ships departed from the Island to the Americas, situated just off the Dakar coast in the Atlantic Ocean. As Macky Sall declared, “The Memorial of Gorée will remember our history so that this horror will never again repeat itself”.

The Gorée Memorial project was launched more than 30 years ago as part of the UNESCO Slave Route Project, which ushered in a new era in the commemoration of the slave trade. Published by UNESCO, From Chains to Bonds (Diène 2001) lauded the Gorée Memorial as one of the exemplary projects of the UNESCO Routes of Enslaved Peoples programme. But when the editor of that volume wrote that slavey was a silenced subject, he probably did not anticipate that it would soon be the subject of several international conferences at which slavery was condemned as crime against humanity. After that, the remembrance of the slave trade has become pivotal to how nations that were historically implicated in the slave trade, reckon with their past.

In the UNESCO Route of Enslaved Peoples Project, the commemoration of the slave trade was always conceived as overcoming the legacies of this trauma. In fact, UNESCO’s agenda had been informed by a utopian drive to overcome the ruination following the Second World War (Meskell 2018). UNESCO was founded to build a world based on international diplomacy. Pivotal to UNESCO’s World Heritage programme was the idea that through its World Heritage Programme, political divisions leading to wars could be overcome. Addressing the ruins of the Second World War, the Holocaust in particular, UNESCO World Heritage offered a programme of repair and reconstruction.

In my book Decolonizing Heritage: Time to Repair in Senegal (De Jong 2022), I argue that Senegalese President Léopold Sédar Senghor quickly saw the potential of UNESCO to promote intercultural dialogue and to recognize the traumas of the slave trade and colonialism. The trauma of the Second World War that led to UNESCO’s foundation, was extended to include a wider range of traumas of modernity to be acknowledged and repaired. When UNESCO recognized the Island of Gorée and the House of Slaves as World Heritage Site (1978), this was to remember the slave trade and found a site of reconciliation.

As students in Paris, Léopold Senghor, Léon Damas, and Aimé Césaire, hailing from the French overseas colonies, had founded the Négritude movement. They reclaimed their Blackness in the face of French racism. For these Négritude scholars, who later became influential politicians, the essence of Blackness lay in their African heritage (Diagne 2010). When he became Senegal’s first President, Senghor launched the First World Festival of Negro Art (1966) to celebrate the arts of Africa and its Diaspora as a Black heritage (Murphy 2016). Senegal’s membership of UNESCO served the reclamation of a Black heritage. It’s not hard to see why the first Senegalese President Senghor conceived of UNESCO as a parallel heritage project.

Decolonizing Heritage explores various UNESCO World Heritage Sites as places for the commemoration of the slave trade and colonialism. Several heritage sites in Senegal are in fact colonial constructions, including the infamous House of Slaves. As many of its cultural heritage sites are remnants of the French empire, Decolonizing Heritage asks how an independent nation cares for the heritage of colonialism? How does it reinterpret slave barracks, colonial museums, and monuments to empire to imagine its own national future?

@1997 Ottavio Di Blasi & Fondation Goree

In this context, we need to keep in mind that when Senegal acquired its independence, Senghor and many other African leaders had anticipated decolonization in some form of political federation (Wilder 2015; Getachew 2019). However, when the process of decolonization finally took effect in the years around 1960, all newly independent African states assumed the nation-state model. What, then, happened to the pan-African ideal? Somewhat counter-intuitively, my book argues that -- in the face of failing pan-African politics -- the ideals of a pan-African future have been preserved in those sites of memory associated with French colonialism. Many sites of memory in Senegal, and especially those authorised as UNESCO World Heritage Sites, have been given a pan-African interpretation.

Revealing how Léopold Sédar Senghor's philosophy of Négritude inflects the interpretation of its colonial heritage, Decolonizing Heritage demonstrates how Senegal's reinterpretation of heritage sites enables it to overcome the legacies of the slave trade, colonialism, and empire. Pan-Africanism, remembered in UNESCO World Heritage sites, is the antidote Senegalese heritage offers to a failing postcolonial present. Remembering and reclaiming a Pan-African future, Senegal’s World Heritage sites are conceived as the archive of an Afrotopia to come. The Monument of the African Renaissance (see picture) is the most recent embodiment of that ideal (De Jong and Foucher 2010).

Ferdinand de Jong

Bibliography

De Jong, Ferdinand. Decolonizing Heritage. Cambridge University Press, 2022.

De Jong, Ferdinand, and Vincent Foucher. "La tragédie du roi Abdoulaye? Néomodernisme et Renaissance africaine dans le Sénégal contemporain." Politique africaine 2 (2010): 187-204.

Diagne, Souleymane Bachir. "Négritude." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2010).

Diène, Doudou, ed. From chains to bonds: the slave trade revisited. Berghahn Books, 2001.

Getachew, Adom. Worldmaking after empire: The rise and fall of self-determination. Princeton University Press, 2019.

Murphy, David (ed.). The First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar 1966: Contexts and Legacies. Vol. 20. Oxford University Press, 2016.

Wilder, Gary. Freedom time: Negritude, decolonization, and the future of the world. Duke University Press, 2015.