This is the back of the Stabroek Market, Georgetown (Guyana), which, in the late 18th century, had been a slave market. Here, after many days at sea, the African captives got their first sight of the then-Dutch colony of Demerara. This is how a Scottish visitor described them in about 1780: ‘The whole party was such a set of scarcely animated automatons, such a resurrection of skin and bones as forcibly reminded me of the last trumpet. These objects appeared that moment to have risen from the grave, or escaped from Surgeon’s Hall, skeletons covered over with a piece of tanned leather.’ Once shaved, they were revived with bananas or oranges, paraded, inspected, and checked for venereal disease.
It’s hard now to imagine the terrors of this market. In the darkness and stink, many of the new arrivals still thought that they were here to be eaten. But it was almost worse for families. They were about to be torn apart forever; brothers taken from siblings, husbands from wives, and children from their mothers. Only occasionally were couples sold as breeding pairs. The rest had no chance. ‘Hungry commerce,’ as the good Dr Pinckard put it, ‘corroded even the golden chains of affection.’
Soon the sales were under way.