“We have this pervasive sense of shame and silence around this phenomenon and that shouldn’t be,” says Kamau Sadiki, lead instructor at Diving With a Purpose, a group of scuba divers that search for wrecks of slave ships to piece together stories of captives. Other less physical, but still powerful ways of memorialising have involved forging human connections between the past and present. Other ships could be honoured in a similar form. In 1993, the National Association of Black Scuba Divers placed a memorial plaque on the wreck site, facing west towards African shores.

One such memorial already exists: in 1700, the slave ship Henrietta Marie was on its way to England with no captives when it capsized on a coral reef off Florida. More than 1,000 slave ships are estimated to have sunk in the Atlantic, presenting the possibility of creating in situ memorials. The infamous “Middle Passage” of the Atlantic is the final resting place for at least 1.8 million AfricansĪnother proposal is to honour some of the ships that never made it. The academics told the boy’s story on a dedicated memorial webpage, including how, after dying in agony, and with none of the traditional mortuary practices of the Bullam kinship network in Sierra Leone to which he may have belonged, he was cast to sea at 10.92º N latitude, -35.42º W longitude. “Everybody else was just ‘man’ or ‘woman’.” “That one little adjective, ‘small’, was the most description of anybody on the list,” Sussman says. On, at 3am, in hazy visibility but with a fresh breeze blowing (the logs callously note the weather alongside the number of deaths from the day before), this boy is recorded as having died of “flux”, an ambiguous medical condition that may have been dysentery. Using ship logbooks that document the approximate locations where Africans were cast into the Atlantic, the Duke project followed one person, identified on the slave ship The Good Hope only as “small boy”. “It poses a particular problem when what you’re trying to commemorate are people who were deliberately lost.”Īnother idea is to trace the story of an individual, as Sussman did with a team of humanities scholars at Duke University.

“The whole point of putting bodies into the sea was that nobody would find them,” says Charlotte Sussman, professor of English at Duke University, North Carolina.

Perhaps it’s not entirely surprising that no such memorial exists, given that the bodies all vanished. And while this Afrofuturist water race is fictional (and there is no known record of pregnant women being cast to sea from slave ships), Drexciya has helped inspire a new movement that is very real indeed: namely, proposals to create an ocean memorial to the victims of slavery.Īmazingly, despite the number of victims – the infamous “Middle Passage” of the Atlantic is the final resting place for at least 1.8 million people from Africa who died on slave ships and were thrown overboard – there is no international memorial to the role of sea crossings in the horrors of the slave trade. What all the Drexciyan tales have in common is an attempt to deal with the trauma of slavery by imagining an alternative narrative. The legend of Drexciya has since been adopted by other artists – such as in a novel, also called The Deep, by Rivers Solomon, and in Abdul Qadim Haqq and Dai Sato’s graphic novel, The Book of Drexciya.

8 bit art view point