crush my heart down

Spurred into action by the visit of an old friend, this past weekend I embarked on my first Tanzanian road trip with yours truly at the helm.  Destination: Bagamoyo.

Seventy kilometers north of Dar, it's a town with a rich and, sadly, dark history.  Bagamoyo, according to Rough Guides, translates to "lay your heart down".  According to the guide we picked up outside of one of the crumbling edifices in Bagomoyo's Stone Town, it means "crush your heart down".  

Arriving at the indiscriminate rubble that comprises this part of the town, I felt vaguely depressed.  Of course, it is fitting that arriving at a former slave port should be a sobering experience.  Along the shores of the Indian Ocean, thousands of Africans, many who had spent up to 9 months traversing the continent, arrived at their last stop before the massive slave trading markets of of Zanzibar.  As the capital of German East Africa, Bagamoyo was one of these such places.

The East African slave trade saw thousands of people captured and sold against their will.  Our enthusiastic and knowledgeable guide traced the last steps of this journey.  From the prison cells in a slave owner's basement that eventually would become the headquarters for the colonizing Germans and later the British after the first World War, to the unrecognizable slave market which now houses the local bounty of generic souvenirs, women hovering over pots of simmering beans and gatherings of unoccupied young men.  Even less recognizable (but easier to guess about) are the ruins along the shore.  Crumbling walls stand over a beach crowded with fisherman dividing the spoils of the day's catch.  The ocean is encroaching upon these ruins steadily at a rate of 60m a year.  Now just metres away, thoughts have turned to ways to relocate the remnants of the building to higher ground.

Standing on the steps that now lead to a tangle of fishing boats and their anchor ropes, I tried to imagine what that last couple of kilometers would have been like.  Starving and shackled by my neck and ankles to my neighbour, would I care about the fate that awaited me beyond these shores? Would I lament not having perished along with countless others? Would I even be capable of thinking? Bagamoyo may very well be the place where these slaves left their hearts, for those who still had them to give.  However, regardless of the translation or the true origins of the name Bagamoyo, hearts were not laid there.  No, that is too benign a descriptor.  This was a dissociation that was violently imposed.  Their hearts were crushed down.