House of Slaves

The House of Slaves, located on Gorée Island three kilometers from Dakar, Senegal, is a museum and memorial dedicated to those who suffered during the Atlantic slave trade. Its most famous feature is the Door of No Return. The museum opened in 1962 and was curated by Boubacar Joseph Ndiaye until his death in 2009. While historians disagree on how many enslaved people were actually held in this building and on Gorée Island’s overall significance in the slave trade, the site remains a powerful destination for visitors from Africa, Europe, and the Americas seeking to honor the human cost of slavery.

The building was constructed around 1776 by Nicolas Pépin, whose sister Anne Pépin was a wealthy signare—a term for elite colonial women traders in Senegal. The house is more closely associated with Nicolas’s daughter, Anna Colas Pépin, who lived there in the early 1800s. The Pépin family owned ships and participated in the slave trade, using the house as a holding center for enslaved Africans before export. Conditions inside were brutal: captives were kept in dark, airless cells, shackled to the floor for days, unable to move. Many died before reaching the ships. Families were separated, with men, women, and children held in different quarters, and most were not sent to the same destinations. Young girls were paraded in the courtyard so traders could select them for sexual exploitation; if they became pregnant, they were allowed to stay on the island until giving birth.

The museum was reconstructed and opened in 1962 largely through the efforts of Boubacar Joseph Ndiaye, who argued that Gorée and the House were central to the slave trade to the Americas. As curator, Ndiaye claimed that more than a million enslaved people passed through the house’s doors. This belief made the site a major tourist attraction and a stop for visiting world leaders.

Historians have challenged these claims, arguing that few enslaved people likely walked through the Door and that Gorée itself was a marginal point in the Atlantic slave trade. Ndiaye and other Senegalese maintained that the site is both a memorial and an authentic historic location, and that its importance is underestimated by Anglophone researchers. Researchers note that the house’s owner may have sold small numbers of enslaved people—kept in the now-reconstructed basement cells—and kept a few domestic slaves, but the actual departure point was a fort 300 meters away on the beach. Some historians record that only 26,000 enslaved Africans are documented as having passed through the island, out of the unknown total exported from Africa. Ndiaye and his supporters countered that the building itself was originally designed to hold large numbers and that as many as 15 million people passed through this particular Door of No Return.

In 1969, historian Philip D. Curtin’s statistical work argued that enforced transports from Gorée began around 1670 and continued until about 1810, with no more than 200 to 300 people per year in significant years and none in others. Curtin recorded that between 1711 and 1810, 180,000 enslaved Africans were transported from French posts in Senegambia, mostly from Saint-Louis, Senegal, and James Fort in modern Gambia. He stated that the doorway itself likely had no historical significance because it was built in the late 1770s, late in the slave-trading era, with Britain and the United States abolishing the trade in 1807. Other academics noted that Curtin did not account for deaths during transport or shortly after capture, which could have raised his estimates. In response, an African historical conference in 1998 claimed that French trading house records from Nantes documented 103,000 slaves from Gorée on Nantes-owned ships between 1763 and 1775. However, the evidence cited actually referred to 103,000 enslaved Africans taken from the broader Upper Guinea region, not Gorée specifically. Scholar Ana Lucia Araujo has said, “It’s not a real place from where real people left in the numbers they say.” Even historians who argue Gorée was never important in the slave trade still view the island as a vital memorial to a trade carried out on a much larger scale from ports in modern Ghana and Benin.

Despite the controversy, the Maison des Esclaves is a central part of the Gorée Island UNESCO World Heritage site, designated in 1978, and a major draw for foreign tourists to Senegal. Just 20 minutes by ferry from central Dakar, the museum receives 200,000 visitors each year. Many, especially those descended from enslaved Africans, describe highly emotional reactions to the site, influenced by Ndiaye’s interpretation—particularly the Door of No Return, through which he argued millions left Africa for the last time.