ROUTE DES ESCLAVES (SLAVE ROUTE)

The Slave Route, close to the Diosso Gorge and the Mâ-Loango Museum, is today an almost totally erased memory of the Congolese landscape. A double row of mango trees symbolises it more than it delimits it for a few hundred metres. The place where the slaves gathered and embarked is located on one of the sides of the road, which slopes gently down to the beautiful, peaceful bay of Loango. Today, in this idyllic setting, it's hard to imagine the suffering of the men who set foot here on a journey of no return. The first stone of a monument was laid a few years ago to mark the spot in the bay where the "ebony wood" embarked. The stone still rests alone on its pedestal, the marble plaque commemorating the event no longer says anything about it, time having erased the text painted on it. And this blank plaque looks like a blank in the Congolese collective memory, while many here evoke the site of Gorée in Senegal as an example. A few metres away, on the grass, lies a kind of chimney made of bricks joined by cement, which has been broken into several sections by the fall. Here, too, is a cement plaque; the hand-engraved letters have held firm, and the plaque reads:

"DEPARTURE OF CARAVANS

FIRST CITY

LOANGO: 1889-

1920 PLACE OF EMBARKATION

OF SLAVES

2 MILLION APPROX "

With no real access road, the site is now an abandoned piece of coastal bush. The passage of rare visitors still marks a trace in the grass.