There is a particular kind of moral vertigo that comes from holding joy and suffering in the same frame — from watching children laugh in a harbour while your stomach is still knotted from the House of Slaves. You do not know what to do with both at once. You are not sure you are entitled to the joy, and you are not sure the grief belongs to you either. But you have seen it. And once you have seen it, there is no clean place to put it down.
This is not a story from far away. What I witnessed in Senegal in August 2016 is the living present tense of decisions made centuries ago — by empires whose legal and economic inheritances we in Canada still carry, largely unexamined.
I went as part of a humanitarian mission with Help Senza Confini. I came back changed. This is my attempt, seven years later, to finally find the words.
When I asked our guide Pape about the origin of the name Senegal, he told me it likely comes from the Wolof: sunu-gaal — “our canoes.” But the phrase carries a meaning deeper than navigation. In Senegalese culture, sunu-gaal means belonging to the same family. Being in the same boat. The instinct to be there for one another — not as charity, but as the natural order of things.
I thought about that phrase for the rest of the journey.
In the fishing village of Ouakam, I watched a canoe come in from the sea. The writing on its hull was barely visible beneath the press of men and children who surrounded it — pushing it out of the water, onto the shore, up onto the sand. Each person who helped would receive a fish. Not as payment. As participation. As the logic of sunu-gaal made physical and visible.
Inside the Dust and the Colour
Every morning, my emotions blended into the traffic — yellow taxis, unconventional buses carrying men and animals from the outskirts to their workplaces, car horns creating what I can only call an atonal harmony. The smell of black exhaust mixed with road dust and the colours of fruit displayed on sidewalks, where women sat on coloured buckets, hands always moving, always making something.
We had come with medicines, clothes, kitchen equipment. We knew what we had brought would help — and that it was not enough. That feeling, the specific weight of not being able to do enough, is the shadow that humanitarian work casts over everything. You look at Francesco, the president of Help Senza Confini, through the dusty taxi mirror, and you both know: we are doing what we can. What we can is insufficient. We are going to keep doing it anyway.
On August 17, at 11:30 local time, we met Secretary General Sidy Gueye of the Ministry of Women, Family, and Childhood. His office smelled of incense; the atmosphere was informal and warm. His business card read: République du Sénégal. Un Peuple — Un But — Une Foi. As he described the Ministry’s projects, something became clear: we were guests of a culture whose foundational value is not accumulation but trust. Their saying, he told us, is: “If you come to me, you are a king.”
I wrote it down. I have not forgotten it.
The Door of No Return
That same afternoon, the sky grey with the rainy season, we took the ferry to Gorée Island — a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1978, home to the Maison des Esclaves, the House of Slaves.
Through that building passed millions of Africans, torn from their homeland, their families, their language, their futures — to be sold into bondage in the Americas. We saw the weapons used by slave traders. The tiny rooms where those who resisted were confined without light. The crowded chambers where children were held. The rooms where women were taken by soldiers and returned pregnant. And finally — the Door of No Return: the opening onto the sea, through which enslaved people were loaded onto ships, or thrown into the water to drown if they were judged too weak to survive the crossing.
This lasted until 1848 — the year of the definitive abolition of slavery in French territories. Less than 180 years ago. Not ancient history. The grandparents of people still living.
I made my way back toward the ferry, trying to contain the nausea. Around me, the colonial-style buildings were beautiful — bougainvillea climbing lava stone walls, sandy streets, facades reminiscent of Cuba. Children played in the harbour, laughing, unbothered by the rain.
Joy and sorrow in the same frame. That vertigo again.
The History We Carry Home
Standing in the House of Slaves, I could not stop thinking about Canada.
We present ourselves — and in many genuine ways, have built ourselves — as a nation of welcome, of multiculturalism, of pluralism. And yet the foundation of this country is also the systematic dispossession of Indigenous peoples, the theft of land protected by treaties that were never honoured, and the deliberate attempt to destroy Indigenous culture through the residential school system: a program in which children were taken from their families, forbidden from speaking their languages, and subjected to documented abuse confirmed by the National Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada.
The last federally operated residential school closed in 1996. Not 1896. 1996.
Canada did not merely benefit from colonialism historically. It is still, in many respects, administering its consequences.
The Gorée Island museum does not allow you to aestheticise the past. It insists you feel the weight of it. And then it sends you back out into the bougainvillea and the children’s laughter and asks you to hold both — the beauty and the crime — without turning away from either. That is what moral witness actually requires. Not guilt performed for an audience. Not reconciliation as slogan. The specific, factual, unflinching acknowledgment of what was done, who did it, who still lives with the consequences — and what those of us who benefit are genuinely willing to change.
What Pape Taught Me About Enough
On the last day, in the darkness of my room, I kept hearing Pape’s voice: “People here don’t feel poverty because we have solidarity.”
We—those of us in wealthy nations—remember solidarity in moments of disaster and then let it recede. We feel poor when our purchasing power is constrained. We have separated sufficiency from community, and then we wonder why sufficiency never arrives.
My son had used my car while I was away. It came back with new dents and scratches. It looked, I thought, like the cars I had seen in Senegal—repaired with what was available, still running, still doing its work. I decided not to fix it. I think of it as my African style—written with all the love I felt for that country and all the respect I have for a people who know how to transform wounds into solidarity, without waiting for permission.
What is essential? Clothes. Shelter. Medicine when you are ill. Work that means something. The warmth of people who will push your canoe onto shore and ask for nothing but a fish in return.
Pape knew. Sunu-gaal. We are in the same boat.
Whether we act like it—that is the question Gorée Island asked me, standing at the Door of No Return, looking out at the sea.
I am still answering it. I think that is the point. The answering never stops.
