Gorée

Gorée is a small island in the roads of Dakar — nine hundred metres long, three hundred wide, twenty minutes by ferry — that Europe used for three centuries as a trading post on the coast of Senegal, and that the world has kept, since UNESCO listed it in 1978, as a memorial to the Atlantic slave trade. It is also, disconcertingly, one of the most beautiful places in West Africa: ochre and rose houses with wooden balconies, bougainvillea over every wall, no cars, sand lanes, a small beach by the pier, baobabs on the Castel — the basalt hill at the southern end, with its Second World War guns and its view back to Dakar — and, at the middle of the eastern shore, the Maison des Esclaves of 1776, a merchant's house with cells below and a doorway open onto the sea that the island calls the Door of No Return. Painters live and work here; a girls' boarding school and a museum of women share the lanes; and the island's own people, some seventeen hundred, are the ones who will tell you what the place means.

The traveller takes the morning ferry from the Embarcadère below the Place de l'Indépendance, pays the island tax, and walks — there is nowhere to hurry to: the Maison des Esclaves first, with the house's guide and in silence, then the Historical Museum in the fort at the northern tip for the long story of the coast, the church of Saint-Charles-Borromée and the stone mosque, the Women's Museum, the ateliers of the sand painters, and up the Castel through the baobabs to the batteries and the wind; eats grilled thiof under a tree by the pier; swims at the little beach if the day is hot; and, if the timing allows, stays a night in a guesthouse — the last ferry takes the day-trippers away at dusk, and Gorée after dark, lanterns and voices and the sea, is the island the residents know.

The Guide's honesty: Gorée is a place of memory before it is an outing — dress and speak in the Maison des Esclaves as you would in a cemetery, let the island's guides speak, and do not argue numbers on the threshold: historians debate how many people were shipped from this particular island, and the island answers, rightly, that it stands for all of them; the ferry runs roughly hourly and fills on weekends and holidays, when Dakar comes to swim — go on a weekday morning; the young men who offer to guide you at the pier vary from excellent to insistent, and the official guides at the museums are the safer choice; the artists' shops expect a look and forgive a no; there are no cars and no banks — carry small notes; and the beauty of the place is not a contradiction of its history but part of the weight of it, and the traveller who feels both at once has understood Gorée.