The Rest Is History - 272: Senegal: The Door of No Return

Episode Date: December 4, 2022

In today's episode, Tom and Dominic discuss the Senegalese island of Gorée, and its complex relationship with the transatlantic slave trade. They look at both the history and mythology of the "House of Slaves", which still stands today as a vestige to human exploitation. Join The Rest Is History Club (www.restishistorypod.com) for ad-free listening to the full archive, weekly bonus episodes, live streamed shows and access to an exclusive chatroom community. *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Hello, welcome to The Rest is History. I've never been a massive connoisseur of Senegalese history. In fact, the first time that Senegal really impinged on my consciousness was when Senegal beat France in the opening match of the 2002 World Cup in Japan and South Korea. The former colonial power, Dominic. It's former colonial power, Dominic. It's former colonial power.

Exactly. So it was a sort of moment charged with historic significance and not purely sporting history. And Tom, you volunteered to dip your toes into Senegalese history for this episode in our World Cup marathon. And what have you come up with? Well, so I vaguely knew about Senegal's prowess on the football field, both because of the victory over France that you mentioned.

Also, I think they won the African Cup of Nations. They did indeed, yes. So they're obviously very, very good at football. There's one other thing that I know about Senegal, which is its most famous tourist attraction, and which featured on, is one of the 12 original World Heritage Sites that were chosen by UNESCO in 1978. And now there are lots and lots and lots of them. So Stonehenge Landscape, for instance, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site for now.

Maybe removed if they go ahead with their tunnel who knows um and actually four of those um 12 original world heritage sites dominic uh feature in our series so the galapagos islands for ecuador we yes will feature in our episode on on uh on ecuador um two uh in our polish episodes of the massive salt mine that goes for hundreds of miles uh central crrakow, and Senegal's most visited tourist attraction, which is on the Isle of Gore. And you may be wondering, well, have you heard of Gore? I haven't, Tom. I'm looking forward to you educating me about it. Well, I won't educate you. I will let the UNESCO website educate you. So this is how they describe Gore. The island of Gore lies off the coast of Senegal,

opposite Dakar. From the 15th to the 19th century, it was the largest slave trading center on the African coast, ruled in succession by the Portuguese, Dutch, English, and French. Its architecture is characterized by the contrast between the grim slave quarters and the elegant houses of the slave traders. Today, it continues to serve as a reminder of human exploitation and as a sanctuary for reconciliation. And the most famous building on Gorée is La Maison des Esclaves, so the House of Slaves, which was built in 1776. It is notorious as a holding center for enslaved Africans. It's kind of redwashed. It's got cellars with kind of iron bars in it. And it has a doorway that looks out onto the Atlantic Ocean. And this is celebrated as the door of no return. And there are famous photographs of it. There's a picture of a silhouetted woman standing in this doorway, kind of leaning against it. And this is the door out of which, as the Gorée tourist board puts it, millions of African slaves took the final step from their home continent and onto the slave ships that would transport them if they survived the journey to the new world.

Gosh, so it's a very sort of baleful place, basically. So basically, I'm putting my hands up, this is pretty much the only image of Senegal that came into my mind when we were divvying up all the various countries. And I thought it would be interesting to put some history to this image that was kind of so vivid in my mind. I mean, it's kind of emblematic of the slave trade, this idea of going through a door forever, the door of no return. Terrifying, terrifying thought.

And the House of Slaves, it's been a museum for many, many decades. So I think Senegal became independent from France in 1960, something like that. Right. And this opened as a museum very shortly afterwards, so 1962. It's been visited by the Pope, by John Paul II, by Nelson Mandela, by a range of American presidents, so Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama. But above all, it's a place of pilgrimage for African-Americans. And basically, I mean, it is, I would guess, the single most

celebrated emblem of the Atlantic slave trade. And when you say celebrated, you don't mean people are letting off fireworks and jumping around in delight. You mean, you know, it's the most well-known because of its… It's a place of pilgrimage. It's a place of pilgrimage. Yeah. But it was a place of horror, I suppose. It serves as a brilliant visual image of the horror.

The sense of a permanent departure. And so that's why coming back to it, I guess, that's the resonance and the power of it. That expression, the door of no return, I mean. Very chilling. Very potent, yeah. So the history of this is that basically there doesn't seem to have been anything much on Gore before the Portuguese arrived because there's not very much water

there and it seems to have been completely infested by termites. And prepossessing. Not really kind of ideal real estate. Yes. So the Portuguese obviously love that kind of place. We did our episodes on the Portuguese voyages of discovery. It becomes a trading post for them. And basically over the next 100 200 300 years it's just endlessly swapping hands so the the dutch take control of it the english take control of it the french take control of it and by the 18th century the french are the kind of you know basically the french putting down roots they're periodically obedient to the rhythms of france's

wars with britain the the british might come in take over, but only for kind of a few years at a time. It's basically become French. And 1783, the French established their rule there for good. And, you know, in various forms, they will rule over Gorée and the hinterland of Senegal until 1960 and independence. So why Gorée and not say further inland and the most obvious answer for that is that the um the inland is incredibly incredibly dangerous it is very very very dangerous to people's health so muslim writers, Muslim geographers, they say of this stretch of the

coastline, if you go there, you will almost certainly die. So there's a geographer in the 11th century called Al-Bakri, who says it's almost impossible to go there and not fall ill. And I'm sure you remember, we talked about this with Karl Harper. And we talked about just how ravaged by disease it is. So I've just got his book here um the the crude death rate in the 18th century was 270 people per 1000 so um yeah so one in four an ordinary pre-modern society says might have a crude death rate of 30 per 1000 yeah and every year along the stretch of the coast more than a quarter of the europeans resident there perished so essentially you want to keep you know as many breezes and as many

currents between you and the microbes and the pathogens that lie on the mainland as possible and just to give people a sense if they're not familiar with it so we're on the coast of west africa um below it's part of dakar now it's it's it's part of the the vast kind of sprawl of dakar but back then it wasn't it was a kind of distinct entity yeah dare i use the word liminal um so it's on the it's on the border zone it's a place that is neither one thing nor the other so it's not an academic podcast no it's so it's it's african but it's not continental. I mean, I think that's the kind of key thing. Yeah.

You look one way, you have Africa. You look the other way, you have the Atlantic. And obviously, if you're traders coming from the Atlantic, looking to pick up trade from Africa, which of course would include slaves, and then take it across the sea, you know, very, very well positioned. It's still dangerous, though. I mean, even on Gore well positioned it's still dangerous though i mean even on gore it's dangerous and so um basically europeans are very very reluctant to stay there any length of time

yeah um and so what they do is that they will marry local women uh and this is a practice that goes right the way back to the portuguese time so these these these women who are um uh local they come to be called senores right is that how you pronounce it, Dominic? Seigniores, I guess. So the European traders will almost invariably leave and their wives, and I use wives slightly in inverted commas, they come to serve as the agents of their absent husbands and increasingly as traders in their own right.

And they will then bring their children up as their own, and they will then raise their sons as heirs, as people who will inherit these kind of trading business. And so you get these very, very wealthy Franco-African trading dynasties. And these are the people who are building uh the houses um on gore at the end of the 18th century so for instance the the man who builds the house of slaves with the door of no return yeah he's the son of a signora and a french surgeon and his sister um who also marries a frenchman who um runs away because there's a yellow fever outbreak, she is also a player in the slave trade. And that's late 18th century. That's late 18th century. So essentially, the slaving that

is happening on Gorée, it's not just French, it's not just African, it's the meeting point between them. And this is expressed through these kind of Creole dynasties that emerged there. 1794, the French Republic bans the slave trade. Napoleon in due course will re-legitimize it, but it does not resume from Gorée. So 1794 is the terminus for the slave trade. And so the Franco-African trading dynasties move into the peanut trade, Dominic. Peanut trade, like Jimmy Carter. Like Jimmy Carter, yes. Very like Jimmy Carter. And with the kind of growing industrialization, growing size of ships, the harbor facilities on Gorée are inadequate. And so they move to the mainland. And the result of that is that the

architecture of 18th century Gorée survives. So we always see this. It's trading cities that get left behind that kind of have the historic architecture, because if they don't, they get demolished and replaced and so on. And so it serves as a kind of very atmospheric reminder of the world of the slave trade just before its abolition. Which means that in 1960, when Senegal becomes independent, Gorée is there as an emblem of the slave trade, but a very picturesque emblem of the slave trade with beautiful kind of buildings, narrow winding roads, no real development. And so it has historical interest and it is picturesque. So it's a sort of a far more horrific equivalent of formerly industrial kind of villages in Britain,

let's say, which were left behind by economic change and then preserved and untouched. Well, like Venice, say. Right. Yes. So Venice is a great trading city, but its decline begins in the 18th century so that when it loses its independence at the end of the 18th century, it's preserved. Yeah. So I think this is kind of rather similar. Although this is charged, this has a kind of moral charge, right? Because of the trade. It is. And it comes to possess this particular charge because of the guy who becomes the curator of the House of Slaves, a man called Boubacar Joseph Ndia.

And I hope I pronounced that right. I may not have done. It's N-D-A-I-A-Y-E. And he is a genius at promoting it and he is the guy who who pushes the idea that um a million slaves have left through the door of no return that 20 million have been exported from gore over the 400 year period of the slave trade from there 20 million from gore alone That's very much what this museum is saying. Yeah. So it's up there on the billboards.

And so from the 70s onwards, so it's there in the 60s, but it's in the 70s that it really takes off as a kind of major tourist attraction. So this is when it gets put on the register of UNESCO World Heritage Sites, one of the first 12 sites anywhere class who want to commemorate how it was that they came to America. And there are no real memorials to the slave trade in the United States itself. So there are memorials to slavery, but not to the trade, I suppose. So the plantations, but you wouldn't go to a plantation, would you?

I mean, it would be no no there's there's no there's no kind of emotional focus for the sense of of grief and pain and suffering and so this you know this door the door of no return the house of slaves on this kind of exquisitely beautiful but menacing island is is kind of perfect um you know there are other sites as well but they tend to be in places that are either very um politically unstable at the time like ghana yeah so in the 60s there's you know it's it's unstable or economically unstable so like tanzania or guinea um so senegal is relatively stable relatively prosperous. And also the 1970s is when you have Alex Helly's book, Roots, which is made into a television film, which again kind of dramatizes in a brilliant way

the whole horror of the Atlantic slave trade. Right. I mean, Roots is 19, the novel is 1976, the TV series is 1977. And as you you say it's impossible to overestimate the effect that had on african americans um and their sort of their desire to find out about their own history and and this sort of idea of a pilgrimage back to find your roots and whatnot and as i say the that idea of a door of no return is so haunting that that is the image that i had in my mind when i said that i would i would do senegal because i yeah you know i i had that image um and so i've i've now given you the backstory of how it is that um it came to be the icon of uh senegalese

history that it is and indeed of african-american history um but there is hanging over hanging over it a question that um is rather similar to the question that i came to ask when i started to work on uh the origins of islam which is is it actually true what are the sources for this okay and so um i think this might be a diplomatic moment to take a break. And when we come back, we'll look and see to what extent was the door of no return actually what the tourist industry says it was. Brilliant. OK, see you after the break. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip.

And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Welcome back to The rest is history we're talking about the house of slaves on the island of gore in senegal um and tom in the first half you painted this very evocative picture of the island of the house of slaves and the sort of the lanes and streets around it and of this particular place this incredibly haunting place,

the door of no return, through which, how many people was it again? A million. A million people. A million slaves passed, never to return, on their journey to the new world. The problem is that there is no documentary evidence for this claim at all. Right, okay. And there's also no documentary evidence for the claim that 20 million slaves were exported from Gorée itself.

Because that's a colossal, I mean, that was an eye-watering claim. So one of the things that is happening in the study of the Atlantic slave trade is that over the course of the 60s and 70s, at exactly the same time as Gorée is being kind of hyped up, you get scholars in US history departments who are

conducting systematic research into the Atlantic slave trade. And what this research indicates is that most of the slaves who are being taken from Senegal are departing from depots at the mouths of the Senegal and Gamba rivers, which lie north and south of Gorée. So not from the House of Slaves at all? No. And the House of Slaves itself, it seems, was never used as a warehouse for slaves. So the cellars in the basement, where you go down there and the guides will say, this

is where slaves were kept before they were transported. They may have been used to house slaves, but if so, they were domestic slaves. They were slaves that were owned by the merchants who owned the house. So they were slaves who weren't going anywhere. They were working for the... Yeah, they're not going to... Yeah, exactly. And the door of no return was absolutely not an exit point

because apparently below it there are rocks. And so it would be dangerous for boats to dock there. So were slaves being transported from the island of Gorée at all? Yeah, the estimate is it's about 500 per annum. Okay. So, I mean, a number, but nowhere near the number that would justify 20 million or whatever. Exactly so. Now, the guy who comes particularly associated with this research is probably the most eminent historian of the

Atlantic slave trade of his generation, a man called Philip D. Curtin, who is the professor of history at John Hopkins. His book, The Atlantic Slave Trader Census came out in 1969, and it was kind of absolutely groundbreaking. And he's very, very upfront in condemning the claims to be made for Gorée. He says the whole story is phony. He calls the House of Slaves a hoax. He calls it a scam. And obviously, this does not go down well with the Senegalese tourist authority. No. And it doesn't go down well, firstly, because, you know, it's not what you want to hear, have your, you know, your prime tourist attraction condemned as a hoax. But it's also because Philip Curtin is white and American.

And so there's very much a feeling that, is it entirely diplomatic for white Americans to undermine, to be lecturing and to kind of be basically saying that the research is shoddy. And so there is a huge controversy that rages through the nineties, actually often conducted in the pages of Le Monde in France rather than in America. But basically I would say now that Curtin's case seems to be pretty generally accepted. As I say, I knew nothing about this apart from the image of the door of no return. Just kind of reading around, so I've been reading around it past week or so. It's pretty much the consensus among Western scholars. So there's a professor at Chicago called Ralph Austin, and he says there are literally no historians who believe the slave house is what they're claiming it to be, or that believes Goree was statistically significant in terms of the slave

trade. In Senegal, there's a very distinguished historian, Abdoulier Kamara, again, I hope I've pronounced that right, who says that he is a historian, I'm not allowed to be sentimental. So yeah, he says says the house of slaves offers a strong powerful sentimental history but i'm a historian i'm not allowed to be sentimental and it's also percolated down to the tourist guide so the lonely planet guide to west africa gore's fabricated history boils down to an emotional manipulation by government officials and tour companies of people who come here as part of a genuine search for cultural roots. Crack it, that's pretty strong.

Yeah, it is strong. It is strong. And so, I mean, I think this kind of raises, obviously, all kinds of interesting and sensitive questions. So the first obvious question is, which I am not qualified to answer because I'm not an African-American, but does it matter if the history is exaggerated? So I found a number of quotations from African Americans who, who basically say, so, so there's in time in 2004, it ran a story on this whole thing.

And it quotes a school teacher, a school teacher from Washington, TC who says there's an unusual human need to have a sacred place. This is ours. Even knowing what she, even knowing that it's exaggerated. Yeah. Uh,

Camara says that the door is a symbol and that the history and memory needs to have a strong symbol. And Dionne Brand, who's a Canadian poet and a novelist. Um, I mean, she, I think writes really,

really fascinatingly that the door exists as an absence, a thing, in fact, which we do not know about a place we do not know. So I mean, she, I think, writes really, really fascinatingly that the door exists as an absence, a thing, in fact, which we do not know about, a place we do not know. So in other words, the very fact that it's not what it says it is, is what gives it its power because it points to everything that has been lost. It points to the way that people have been uprooted, that entire stories have been forgotten, that entire history has been erased. And it's a kind of absence centre, if you want to put it like that. So listening to that, Dion Brand, that seems to me a very convoluted way of trying to justify the fact that, you know, the place you're visiting is not the place you think it is. But on the other hand, I suppose the counter argument would be we in Britain have loads of historical sites that are bogus, you know, bogus, fabricated, that we attribute with all kinds of meaning that's really not necessarily justified. I mean, I can't think of them. I can't pluck them off the shelf.

Okay, but I think actually the parallel isn't really with tourist sites. It's with pilgrimage sites. Right, yeah. actually the parallel isn't really with tourist sites it's with pilgrimage sites right yeah you know you can you know we've we've done the car but we've and in that we we talked about the the tomb of christ and all you think about um tombs of saints or whatever you were saying about jerusalem tom that you go to jerusalem and people say well this is calvary this is this and actually it's custom and tradition that tells you it's this rather than rigorous and the emotional investment right because a place that that comes to have the emotional investment of its visitors, it does, I think, come to take on a, dare I say, sacral quality.

Absolutely, you're right. So I think the image of the door is powerful enough that it can survive the fact that it isn't actually overtly what it says it is. I mean, I think it does still endure as a symbol. I think the other thing that's interesting about it is that it becomes a UNESCO heritage site the year before Auschwitz does. And I suspect that lurking behind quite a lot of this is the way that sites to do with the Holocaust are starting to be packaged as places for tourists to visit. So I think that that's a possibility. I think that one thing that is slightly awkward about this

is that by emphasising the slaves who were taken to North America and by tailoring the experience of visiting it to the people who can pay for it, in other words, Americans, one awkward question is, well, what about the slaves who were taken to, say, to Brazil or to the Caribbean? Yeah, who were by far the, I mean, the Brazilian element of the slave trade was the single biggest element, wasn't it? We've discussed that in previous episodes.

Yeah. And presumably they're not getting visitors from Brazil. No. To the Island of Gori. Well, there may be a few, but I don't think so. Not many. And I think also that it touches on issues that I think have become a lot more sensitive now than they were, say, in the 1990s. Because what's striking when you read the debate in the 1990s is actually, it's not how vituperative it is, but relative to today, how measured it is. So there's indisputably, you know, there is

a sense of resentment on the part of African scholars, of white American scholars kind of crashing in and laying down the law. And I think there is also, you know, there's a sense in academic departments in America that it is usually white historians who are kind of undermining these narratives. It tends to be white historians. Sorry, Tom, I was just going to jump in and say there's been a colossal furore in the United States about this very issue with regard to a different site. Yeah. So this is Elmina Castle in Ghana, I think. Yeah. So this is exactly what I thought about when I started reading this. And I was reading about what happened in the 1990s and thinking, actually, it seems to have passed off quite quietly. Because as you say, there's been this scandal kind of explosion of debate and fury

around exactly this issue this summer yeah so the president of the american historical association who was a man called james sweet a very distinguished historian i think he wrote an article in their sort of newsletter talking about what he saw as the dangers of present-mindedness and history of sort of subjecting history to making it purely a vehicle for contemporary politics. And he gives, in the course of this, sort of buried in the article, he talks about how, you know, he's a historian, I think, of Africa. And he and his family went to a wedding in Ghana, and they went on a tour of this place called Amina Castle.

And he comments in the article, he says, you know, the weird thing about this place is that it's become, he describes it as, I mean, you talked about pilgrimages, Tom, he describes it as an African American shrine. It's become more of an African American shrine than a Ghanaian archaeological or historical site. And then he goes on to say, he's really troubled by this because he says less than 1% of the Africans who went through Elmina went to North America. The vast majority went to Brazil or the Caribbean, but their stories are kind of erased and it's been turned into, I mean, he doesn't make this explicitly, but he basically is saying it's been turned into a kind of Disney-fied tourist attraction for relatively affluent african americans that it's been retrofitted yeah that the history has been retrofitted exactly and

the the slaves taken to brazil have been erased basically now the difference between the 1990s he wrote this um and it's actually a very sober kind of piece there was a massive furore and he did that thing which we've talked about a few times on the rest of history. He did this sort of post-cultural revolution groveling apology. And he said, I'm deeply sorry. I've let everybody down. I should never have pointed this out. I've alienated my colleagues. I've done this, that, and the other. And it's actually, I mean, without us taking sides on this at all, because we're not specialists, you know,

it's a very good example of how embittered this whole and how incredibly difficult this whole conversation has become. Yes, and I think also it lends weight to the idea that this is fundamentally about, it's a place of almost religious pilgrimage. And the issues are basically kind of, you know, verging on the theological. I think that as, you know, the overt hold of kind of Christian doctrines that were so important to the civil rights movement have kind of faded from a progressive wing of American politics. In a way, history has come to replace the Bible. It's come to replace the theological

dimensions. To question received understandings of history has become akin to questioning devoutly held beliefs about religion and God. And just as questioning the validity of a religious place of pilgrimage is incredibly sensitive, so likewise, it's evident that to question this is similarly um it upsets people very much because there there are two arguments wouldn't there one would be to say you white americans or indeed britain or indeed white british podcasters right right as i've had to say exactly that white british podcasters are white american historians doesn't matter which have no business know, this is yet more colonialism or something. Some people would say sort of some kind of intellectual colonialism.

And the other counter argument, I suppose, would be, well, in a way, the literal truth, whether or not millions of slaves pass through is less important than the metaphorical truth. That's what the defenders of this institution would say, wouldn't they? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's pretty much what Dion Brand is saying, I think. And what do you think, Tom? Well, I think that that is up to the individual pilgrim who goes there. I mean, I entirely see that if you're an African-American who wants some sense of contact with your ancestor and all the suffering and horror that was inflicted on those ancestors. And this door, this building, this island has come to be

a focus for that. I don't think that the kind of statistical evidence for it actually matters one way or the other. I think it's perfectly possible, and I speak with some experience of this, to go to a place where you know that the history may be dubious, but because it's become endowed with particular understanding by generations of people who've gone there before you, the power of it is, you know, that's a legitimate response. But I do also think that, you know, a world of historical inquiry ships that carried people back from Dunkirk, which obviously stirs great feelings of patriotic excitement and all right-thinking Britons. And feel moved by it, while simultaneously knowing that most soldiers were not rescued by little ships. And that had that little ship never gone, the course of the war would be no different. And actually, it's perfectly reasonable to have both those things in your head at once. On the one hand, you're very moved by this little metaphor. But on the other hand, you know as a scholar, that the, as it were, in inverted commas, the real history is very different. And I think the problem with this is if one crowds out the other. Well, I don't think that a myth, a myth isn't a dirty word, I don't think.

No, agreed. And myths are deserving objects of historical study and the way that they grow and the hold that they have. It's not for historians to patrol them and mock them and poo-poo them and say that they're not valid, because they are. But likewise, I don't think that you can, you know, and I kind of had experience of this writing about religion. In a way, you have to acknowledge the power and the potency of religious myths, of religious teachings, of whatever, while simultaneously adopting a kind of skeptical attitude where there is room for skepticism i also think you can't have a world

in which james w sweet or whatever his name is or any or philip curtain that they feel they can't talk about this by virtue of their whiteness well i think i think the thing that's interesting is that that curtain obviously never felt that whereas sweet obviously does so uh and i think that that's a kind of reflection of maybe the the uh the the change of culture in in the united states i mean i have to say from my own point of view i was not expecting to arrive at this conclusion i mean i did i i did not know this when I set out. And I think it's a really, really interesting topic. I mean, the test, I suppose, to some extent is if you were in Senegal, would you go? And of course,

I would go, wouldn't you? I would absolutely go, yes. Yes. And it wouldn't bother me that it was slightly confected, but I would want to know. I would want to know the truth as well as seeing the metaphor. But you're saying that as someone whose ancestor wasn't ever taken from the coast of Africa. So I think that the emotional complications of it are more complex for people whose ancestors were taken from there. It's easier for a sceptic to sort of hurl out opinions from the outside, someone who's not personally involved, than I guess it is for a pilgrim, to use your analogy, Tom. Yeah, in a very, very different way. I don't particularly like people

casting doubt on the greatness of Alfred. For instance, you know, there are fields in history where we have emotional engagement equally. There is a kind of responsibility for your history, if you're researching history, researching the the past that you have to deal with a certain you know where there's a certain bedrock of fact i don't think that you can ignore it so it wouldn't be a rest his history podcast about the history of senegal if you didn't find a way to bring it back to alfred the great and you have yeah so um no it's an absolutely fascinating story because it raises interesting questions not just about i mean in a weird way this is not a story it started out as a story about senegal and

you know the early modern period going up to the 18th century and then newly independent senegal but it's actually ended up being a podcast about the racial politics of america and about the nature of history and myth so like like all great Restless History podcasts, we've been on a journey, Tom. We have. Haven't we? We have. We've been on a journey and we'll be going on another journey tomorrow, excitingly. So we'll see you then. We will see you then. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com. dot com