Atlantic trade, enslavement and colonial rule

Trade and forced movement

Portuguese voyages reached the river in the fifteenth century. European traders entered an existing African political and commercial world, negotiating and competing for influence. The Atlantic trade in enslaved Africans brought profound suffering, separating families and linking the region to plantation economies overseas.

Responsibility should be described carefully: African participation in capture and sale existed alongside European commercial demand, shipping and colonial plantation systems. Enslaved people were human beings with families, skills and histories, not simply a category of goods.

Read the landscape as evidence

Kunta Kinteh Island and related sites at Albreda, Juffureh and the river mouth preserve evidence of different stages of African–European encounters. Fortifications served changing purposes over time. Britain’s abolition of its slave trade in 1807 did not instantly end slavery or illegal trafficking.

Bathurst, now Banjul, was founded in 1816. The expansion of British administration was gradual, and the coastal Colony and inland Protectorate were governed differently. Anti-slave-trade operations, commerce and imperial power developed in overlapping ways.

Remember without simplifying

A heritage visit can connect local history with the African diaspora. Treat the sites as places of memory as well as visitor destinations. A famous novel or film can inspire interest, but individual characters and family genealogies require their own evidence.

Discussion

What can a fort tell us? What can it not tell us about the people who passed through it? Consider the differences between an archaeological site, a family account and a work of historical fiction.