If you were to visit Gabon in Africa, you’d be amazed by its spectacular landscapes. Being 85% forest, Gabon holds 10% of all African forests, but more importantly, it’s home to the biggest population of elephants in the world. If you were to visit the beaches of Gabon, you could even say you’re standing right in paradise. However, hidden inside its green rainforest, tropical beaches, and amazing fauna, Gabon has a painful historical scar as one of the African countries that have suffered and are still suffering from poaching and pillage.
Today, the golden prize is mainly ivory; a couple of centuries ago, it was human flesh, seen as a mere commodity. Right in the heart of the Loango National Park, and surrounded by gorgeous vegetation and majestic elephants, lies what was called the Vallée des Esclaves (Valley of Slaves), a set of small islands where over a million African slaves saw their hopes for freedom crushed as they reached their last stop before being sent into the fearsome ocean, and to their new hellish destination, the Americas.
By the late eighteenth century, Gabón, or as it was called back then, the Kingdom of Loango, was responsible for almost half of the slave trade from West Africa to the Americas. The Valley of the Slaves and, to be precise, the Iguela Lagoon inside what’s now the Loango National Park, was a settlement where over a million slaves were organized to be shipped to America, mainly to Brazil.
In recent years, what’s startled historians and archaeologists about this paradisiac spot, besides the shackles and chains, found all over West Africa, is the oyster shell foundations of an island in the Iguela Lagoon. With nothing to eat for days, the only available food slaves had was oysters. The region is rich in this mollusk, and today, the oysters of the region are considered a culinary delicacy. Back then, they were the only source of food that would give slaves the strength to endure a journey not everybody survived.
Slaves would take the oysters from the bank of the lagoon, eat as much as they could and drop the shells on the ground. The number of shells disposed of by these people over the years was so big, that these even elevated the ground level of the island up to four meters high. To fully see the magnitude of the number of people who were enslaved and transported to the Iguela Lagoon, you have to picture the dimensions of the island. To make the foundations of two and a half thousand acres raise its ground level with oyster shells, you have to imagine how many millions of oysters had to be consumed by thousands and thousands of people.
This settlement wasn’t only a key spot for the slave trade, but also an important destination in a wider commercial trade. Besides organizing slaves to be shipped, colonizers would exploit the rainforest for goods; the main product besides human trade was ivory, thanks to the number of elephants in the region, and ebony. Both humans and elephants were decimated for centuries.
Yes, the Iguela Lagoon and this oyster island offer a unique tropical sight for those visiting Gabon; but they should be remembered for what it is, a painful scar of the millions of lives taken, and a reminder of the reaches that ambition and power are capable of pushing. Slavery wasn’t only a racist-driven crime, but a capitalist enterprise that didn’t mind making use of the most despicable atrocities to achieve it.
