Status
Checked out
Due Apr 17, 2024
Collection
Publication
Dutton Juvenile (1994), Edition: 1st, 48 pages
Description
Presents the brutal history of Goree Island, a former African slave trading post that is now a sunny paradise attracting tourists unaware of its dark past.
Local notes
School Library Journal, 10/31/1994
Gr 5 Up-Barboza shares a pilgrimage to then island off the coast of Senegal from which some 60,000 captured Africans were held before being sold to slave traders. Americans, white as well as black, go there to re-experience in their own ways the horrors of that piece of the past. The full-color photographs are well chosen and adequately captioned. Interviews with people currently living on Goree emphasize their diversity and their warm feelings toward their American ``relatives.'' The well-researched text gives an absorbing, clear picture of this island and the larger slave trade it represented. The author describes the African kingdoms of the time and the signares, influential African women whom wealthy European traders married by African law, thus strengthening their contacts on the mainland. Even so, however, Barboza underemphasizes the extent to which, for the first 300 years of contact, powerful African states determined where and how Europeans might trade slaves. Better than many magazine articles on the subject, this book is outstanding in its portrayal of the significance of the place.-Loretta Kreider Andrews, Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore
Gr 5 Up-Barboza shares a pilgrimage to then island off the coast of Senegal from which some 60,000 captured Africans were held before being sold to slave traders. Americans, white as well as black, go there to re-experience in their own ways the horrors of that piece of the past. The full-color photographs are well chosen and adequately captioned. Interviews with people currently living on Goree emphasize their diversity and their warm feelings toward their American ``relatives.'' The well-researched text gives an absorbing, clear picture of this island and the larger slave trade it represented. The author describes the African kingdoms of the time and the signares, influential African women whom wealthy European traders married by African law, thus strengthening their contacts on the mainland. Even so, however, Barboza underemphasizes the extent to which, for the first 300 years of contact, powerful African states determined where and how Europeans might trade slaves. Better than many magazine articles on the subject, this book is outstanding in its portrayal of the significance of the place.-Loretta Kreider Andrews, Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore