MEDIUM: fiber and cowrie shell
DIMENSIONS: H x W x D: 5 5/8 × 6 1/2 × 6 1/2 in. (14.3 × 16.5 × 16.5 cm)
In 2015, artisans created this basket in Mossuril, Mozambique to hold soil from the region to be deposited at the site of a wrecked Portuguese slaver off the coast of Cape Town, South Africa. In 1794, the São José Paquete d’Africa departed Mozambique Island with 512 captive Mozambicans destined for Maranhão, Brazil. Caught in a storm, the ship wrecked near Cape Town. The European captain, crew, and about half of those enslaved were saved一only to be resold into slavery. The remaining Mozambicans perished in the waves.
During a ceremony to publicly remember this event, Evano Nhogache, a traditional leader from the likely site of the enslaved people’s last steps in their homeland, entrusted this basket to NMAAHC Director Lonnie Bunch. He asked him to place the soil near the wreck site to symbolically reconnect those lost Mozambicans with their homeland.
“Once the ancestors direct you to spill the soil over the wreck it will be the first time our people will have slept in their homeland.” He continued, “Look into our faces. Do you see us? Surely amongst the fallen were those who were guardians of these same communities. Tell our ancestors that their people are still being cared for by those of us here who are standing here today.”
At a second ceremony at Clifton Beach in Cape Town, the soil was poured from the vessel into the ocean next to the wreck site by three members of the Slave Wrecks Project—an African American diver, a South African archaeologist, and a Mozambican student.
The slave trade represents a chapter in global history that continues to shape our world. The Saõ José’s voyage of exploitation, subjugation, and violence was one of tens of thousands. It brings the story of the world’s largest forced migration to a human scale. This simple basket illustrates how the process of recovering this tragic history in the early twenty-first century might be one of repair, reckoning, cooperation and justice amongst individuals, institutions, and nations.
Paul Gardullo is the Supervisory Museum Curator and Director of the Center for the Study of Global Slavery at the National Museum of African American History and Culture.