Duke Alumnus Authors Paper On Memorializing The Middle Passage

More than 12.5 million Africans were carried across the Atlantic on 40,000 slave-trading voyages. 

A group of researchers is making the case for marking a memorial to the nearly 2 million Africans who lost their lives during the trans-Atlantic slave trade. They want what's known as the Middle Passage identified on maps with virtual ribbons, tracing slave routes. 

Future deep-sea mining operations in these waters could uncover artifacts from an estimated 1,000 slave-trade shipwrecks. Identifying the historical significance there would offer protection for any archaeological finds.

WFDD's Eddie Garcia spoke with Dr. Phillip Turner. He's a Duke University alumnus based out of the U.K. and lead author of the report.

Interview Highlights

On the importance of memorializing the Middle Passage:

I feel there's not a great appreciation for the level of mortality that occurred, the experiences enslaved African people went through on that voyage. Horrific and historical accounts of those are harrowing. That journey, which could take on average around two months, crammed in hulls with between 200 and 400 other people. Unimaginable conditions, really. 

If anyone was dying or ill during those voyages, they would just be thrown overboard. So the Atlantic Ocean became their burial ground, and the seabed their final resting place.

On marking the slave-trade routes:

The Middle Passage is quite a difficult thing to think about how to memorialize because it's not a location, it's not a single thing that can be protected.

It's had various routes across both the North and South Atlantic. And what we're proposing in this kind of — I guess you could call it a cartographic memorial, these representations on maps — we don't want to claim that that's how it should be memorialized, or it's the correct way. We're trying to encourage the conversation of the International Seabed Authority about the cultural significance of the seabed in this context.

Dr. Turner says informal conversations are going on between African nations to get their perspectives on the project, and the hope is they can drive the conversation moving forward.

*Editor's Note: This transcript was lightly edited for clarity.