On the north-east side of Gorée island, facing the southern shore of the Cap Vert peninsula, a row of eighteenth-century merchant houses stand as reminders of the era of the Atlantic slave trade. One of the houses is now a museum known as the Maison des Esclaves, and receives a steady stream of visitors who disembark from the ferry that shuttles between Dakar and Gorée. Visitors can observe the spacious quarters of the merchant house on the upper level of the museum, and the dark, cramped dungeons and storehouses below, the captiveries or slave pens where slaves were held.

Merchant houses like the slave museum temporarily harbored slaves purchased by individual merchants, who were later transferred to the prison-like fortress across the harbor where the Senegal Company held slaves before they embarked on the middle passage to slavery in the Americas. At the back of the house a doorway looks out on the open sea. Once used to receive small craft ferrying slaves and provisions from the mainland, the doorway is locally known as the “door of no return,” a passageway that separated departing slaves from Africa forever. The soft, rose pastel of the stuccoed houses, their crumbling tile roofs, and the beauty of the bougainvillea that hangs over the walls of the enclosed courtyards and shades the narrow streets, contrasts sharply with the images of terror and heartbreak evoked by the narrow dungeons that echo with the sounds of the Atlantic.

On the same side of the island, a visitor might note that one of the narrow streets nestled below the steep hill covered with the ruins of ancient and modern fortifications is called the “rue des Bambaras.”