East Africa's Gorée: slave trade and slave tourism in Bagamoyo, Tanzania
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A tourist visiting Bagamoyo, Tanzania, today would be hard pressed not to come away with the impression that this idyllic, seaside port was once the centre of the East African slave trade. Local museums, interpretive signposts, and amateur tour guides throughout the town claim that tens of thousands of enslaved Africans were brought to Bagamoyo each year before being shipped off across the Indian Ocean. In 2006, the Tanzanian government applied to UNESCO to have Bagamoyo recognized as the exit point of the Central Slave and Ivory Trade Route that reached as far west as Lake Victoria. This paper investigates this application by assessing claims made to prove Bagamoyo's reputation as a major slave entrepôt against archival evidence. Similar to the case made by Phil Curtin in 1995 on H-Net regarding the memorialization of the West African island of Gorée, I demonstrate that enslaved Africans did not constitute a significant portion of local exports and that numbers have been highly exaggerated; instead, the trade in iAvory is what placed Bagamoyo on the map. This paper also considers the implications of this case study for the controversial debate between tourism and historical context; between symbolic representation and academic integrity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".