We are members of Diving With a Purpose (DWP), a nonprofit organization started almost 16 years ago by the ever-dapper Ken Stewart, who at age 74 still moves with a dip in his step and communicates with a twinkle in his eye. He is meticulously groomed—salt-and-pepper beard neat as can be—with a beautiful voice that rises and falls with the cadence of a soulful love song.
Ken’s passion is this work. He spends his days moving forward this big, audacious, crazy mission to train up the next generation of black folks specifically, although all are welcome, to dive into the depths of the ocean and find their own history and tell their own stories….
During the past nine months, I have traveled with these divers and their partner organizations, mainly in the role of storyteller, to witness the search for slave shipwrecks firsthand and gather tales over coffee, on the beach, in quirky hotels, during fancy dinners, and in places as far away as Mozambique, South Africa and Senegal, as surprising as Costa Rica and St. Croix and as predictable as the U.S….
About 35,000 ships brought nearly 12.5 million captive Africans across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas between the 15th and 19th centuries, according to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. Of the estimated 500 to 1,000 ships that purportedly wrecked, only five have been found—and of those, only two have been properly documented.
Fragments of these wooden ships are notoriously hard to find after centuries in the water, but such a small number of finds also points to a larger societal disinterest in their discovery. Maybe that lack of interest is in part because rather than jewels and gold coins, the treasure of these ships exists primarily in the form of knowledge and lost memory. But maybe it is also because this thread of history has been glossed over in our history books—the experience and journey of captured Africans, only a footnote, a few paragraphs, a day’s covered material in class … a huge swath of history suppressed and forgotten.
I began to realize the gargantuan task of trying to communicate the facts, not to mention the impact and importance of the slave trade and its relationship to modern-day society.
Through the centuries, Europe, Africa and the Americas have woven a deeply intertwined and dependent net, one that is connected in three equal parts—and that still exists today—but that we pretend is not there.
In Roman, Greek and British tragedies, we get to delve deep into the minds of main characters; we get to understand their dreams and passions, dalliances, betrayals, doubts, worries, pain, joys, sorrows, loves; we see whole pantheons of emotions as we are given complicated stories with fully expressed human beings. The transatlantic slave trade, however, when mentioned, is only one note in our history books. It’s a sad and shameful story. And the characters are often flat caricatures who fall neatly into the categories of oppressor and victim.
But the stories of this 400-year–plus history, full of millions of people from dozens of countries around the world, are far more complex.
They beg us to consider questions of faith, ancestry, worth, morality … of our very own identity. How can we know who we are really without deeply contemplating the consequences of our history?
h/t Explorator
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