Gorée Island is a small island located off the coast of Dakar, the capital of Senegal. While the island is home to over 1,800 permanent residents, it is most famous for the historical site called the House of Slaves or the Door of No Return, which is rumored to be the last place millions of slaves passed through before boarding ships destined for the New World. In 1978 the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) deemed the island an official World Heritage Site and corroborated the site’s claim that millions of enslaved Africans had passed through the House of Slaves, making it one of the largest slave-trading centers on the African coast.

Smith, however, notes that additional scholarship conducted on the island uncovered that only an estimated 33,000 people were shipped to America from Gorée and that it was not singularly—or even primarily—used as a mechanism of the slave trade from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century. In this way, the House of Slaves and its curators are perpetuating a historical narrative founded on mistruths and obfuscation, not dissimilar to the museum and tours at Angola Prison.

When Smith discussed this fact with the current site manager of the House of Slaves, Eloi Coly, Coly stressed the importance of Gorée as a symbolic beacon—a synecdoche for the greater horrors and massive scale of the slave trade. Through this reasoning, Coly defended the museum’s approach to its history as not only telling the story of Gorée but also the story of transatlantic slavery more generally, and pointed to the importance of having a singular gathering place where people can embark on joint remembrance.

Another interesting aspect of slavery that Gorée explores is the direct involvement of Africans in supplying slaves for Europeans to transport to the new world. Smith describes how Europeans traded guns, alcohol, and other goods to African tribes in return for possession of their prisoners of war. The introduction of firearms made the tribal warfare that was already rife throughout Africa all the deadlier, and the knowledge that Europeans would only accept prisoners of war as payment for these goods gave the tribes an increased incentive to capture members of opposing tribes. Throughout the chapter, Smith returns to the idea of culpability—are the Africans who participated in selling their countrymen to Europeans in exchange for such goods equally culpable for the horrors of the slave trade?

Epilogue

In the epilogue to How the Word Is Passed, Smith explores how this project has been both at once an academic exercise meant to expose where the narrative of American history has been warped by racial prejudice, and a deeply personal reckoning with his own past. Indeed, Smith discusses how his grandfather’s grandfather was enslaved on a Mississippi plantation at the time of emancipation. The epilogue recounts his conversation with both his maternal grandfather and paternal grandmother about their own experiences living through the Jim Crow era and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1970s as Black Americans in a country that sees Blackness as peripheral to the national narrative.

Analysis

The final chapter and epilogue of How the Word Is Passed work as foils for one another, revealing the impact of the transatlantic slave trade both on both a global and a deeply personal level. Smith’s visit to Gorée Island highlights how slavery was but one facet of colonialism, which impacted both those who were forcibly relocated from Africa as well as those who were left behind under European occupation. In this way, slavery is more than an American narrative, and Smith uses Gorée to effectively demonstrate...