‘It is over three hundred years old,’ James says as they park before it. It is made of stone – originally brown, it has now turned green because of the lichen and fungi bred on it by the damp air from the sea. The wood that supports the roof has totally decayed and the roof now rests on the building’s shoulders, propped up by beams from the floor of the upper room. They meet a band of three bored-looking students being shown around by the old, sleepy guide. They do not join them. James has obviously been here before; he leads Lomba to a wooden shelf behind a glass partition where there is an array of variously shaped irons. Some are obviously chains; others are thin and circular; yet others are like bracelets, but cruder and thicker, wrought with no regard for beauty. They are old and rusty and utilitarian – and even if one didn’t know that they were tools of slavery, their cruel purpose would still be unmistakable.

‘These are the gewgaws of slavery,’ James says, pointing. ‘That circular piece is the mouth-lock. And that bracelet is the leg-iron. The round one is for the neck, it was used to join one slave to another with that chain.’

They move on, passing the group of students. One of them, a fat, small-eyed youth, catches Lomba’s eye and yawns. The damp air from the sea makes the atmosphere heavy, hot. On one wall is a wooden plaque with the words ‘SLEEPING SECTION’, and an arrow pointing to the floor. They stand and stare at the plaque silently; Lomba imagines the bodies on the floor in exhausted sleep, waiting to be taken away in the morning.

‘The word “sleeping” is a misnomer. The slaves couldn’t have slept a wink. Imagine them piled in hundreds in this narrow space, chained, tired, broken and wounded: behind them lay family, friends, gods, land; and before them was the vast sea with the coffin-like ship at anchor, waiting to take them to another place, dark and unknown, and slavery, or maybe death by water. This was really a “sleepless section”. No sleep was slept here, and if there was, it was in fits and jerks. Let’s go.’

Outside, they stand by the car and stare at a faraway ship approaching the port. ‘It was in the ships that the mouth-locks were used, so that they couldn’t console each other and rally their spirits and thereby revolt. To further discourage communication, no two persons of the same language were kept together: Mandingo was chained to Yoruba, Wolof was chained to Ibo, Bini was chained to Hausa. You see, every oppressor knows that wherever one word is joined to another word to form a sentence, there’ll be revolt. That is our work, the media: to refuse to be silenced, to encourage legitimate criticism wherever we find it. Do you now understand?’