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Remembering the 212 enslaved Africans who drowned on this day in 1794 when ship they were on, Sao Jose Paquete de Africa, got caught between two reefs off the Camps Bay coast and broke apart. They were among 543 enslaved people who had been kidnapped from Mozambique.
The 331 survivors were sold to Dutch farmers. The ship had set sail 3 weeks before heading for Brazil.
These were some of the remains of the ship found five years ago by archeologists.
The page isn't loading on my side so I can't share the link to the Slave Wrecks Project. Maritime archeologists are doing work to uncover clues to this period by diving into our oceans and recovering pieces of slave ships that never made it to their destination.
So according to this piece the pieces retrieved off the South African coast were taken to the National Museum of African American History and Culture in the USA. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/sunken-18th-century-slave-ship-found-south-africa-180955458/
I think that's disappointing. Where was the heritage council when this happened? They should've been in Cape Town. That's where the tragedy happened. And that's where the survivors were traded, and their descendants are in Cape Town. The way I see it, that history belongs to us.
This history also reminds me of research done on some of the oldest sharks in the Atlantic. Sharks lived off of the bodies of enslaved Africans who were either thrown overboard slave ships or drowned as a result of shipwrecks of slave ships like the Sao Jose.
Here's one such article. Very upsetting stuff. Please read when you're ready to. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/249027449_History_from_below_the_water_line_Sharks_and_the_Atlantic_slave_trade
1994 marked 300 years since this tragedy. I can't find any information, but I do hope the government of the time commemorated the day. I hope wreath was laid at Camps Bay with at least Mozambique's ambassador to SA present. If not, I hope we do something in 2024.
200 years, not 300.
