Secrets of the deep: Senegal`s slave shipwreck detective
(Artdaily.org)

Staring out to sea on a flawlessly sunny day, underwater archaeologist Ibrahima Thiaw visualises three shipwrecks once packed with slaves that now lie somewhere beneath Senegal`s Atlantic waves. He wants more than anything to find them. Thiaw has spent years scouring the seabed off the island of Goree, once a west African slaving post, never losing hope of locating the elusive vessels with a small group of graduate students from Dakar`s Cheikh Anta Diop University. Goree was the largest slave-trading centre on the African coast between the 15th and 19th century, according to the UN`s cultural agency UNESCO, and Thiaw believes his mission has a moral purpose: to heal the open wounds that slavery has left on the continent. `This is not just for the fun of research or scholarship. It touches us and our humanity and I think that slavery in its afterlife still has huge scars on our modern society,` he said, pulling on a wetsuit and rubber boots for the day`s