PROLOGUE
A person has a past. The experiences gathered during one's life are a part of today as well as yesterday. Memory exists in the nostrils and the hands, not only in the mind. A fragrance drifts by, and a memory is evoked . It damages people to rob them of their past and deny their memories, or to mock their fears and worries. A person without a past is incomplete.
A person's past is inconceivable without a place . The places of ones wounding, individually and collectively, historically and contemporaneously are infused with the actions and adhere to the victims both in body and harmony.
African history, I have learned is a series of atrocities and traumas . Physically, emotionally, psychologically, as our ancestors endured much.
As much as slave trade , this has come to define my sense of the wound of African continent generally. Africans were kidnapped, stolen from their homelands and sold to slavery.
Dakar, Senegal 🇸🇳 was one of the main ports of transit where captives were brought, bought and shipped to America 🇺🇸. To understand Senegalese ethos today , one must understand the importance of the experience of the African slave trade, which extends to the visuals , the emotions, the memories of place , that is to the entire experience.
The myth of Goree island and the house of slaves that we ,must seek to understand. For the European by stander , it is easy to dismiss the slave trade as having happened over 100 years to some group at some places ; it is markedly different if ones cultural identity rests in a continual retelling.
As Donald L. Fixico writes " when retold , the experience comes alive again, recreating the experience by evoking the emotions of listeners, transcending past, present and future. Time does not imprison the story "(fixico 2003 , pt. 22). "The telling of these stories forms an integral part of Senegalese ethos, both as a haunt and as a wound.
To this I bring you the story of DULAI. A boy who was a victim of slavery and his life story , and most especially his intriguing love ❤️ story.