Tara Roberts, who will be on the next cover of National Geographic, talks about the exploration of slave shipwrecks to piece together more about African-American history. Picture: Shelley Kjonstad/African News Agency(ANA)
Durban - Journalist Tara Roberts started out writing for women’s and teens’ magazines, covering issues such as food, parenting, astrology and books.
Now, scuba gear is often her work uniform as she dives into the undersea world of slave shipwrecks, following fellow African American divers in their pursuit to find out more about their history.
Roberts’ picture is scheduled to be on the front cover of next month’s issue of National Geographic, which has helped fund her storytelling through podcast series Into the Depths about wrecks between Mozambique and Costa Rica. Some of the 1 000 vessels were among 36 000 slave voyages, over 400 years, landed up in watery graves.
Roberts visited the city this week to address the Inaugural Nature, Environment and Wildlife Filmmaking Fellows Summit.
She said that while confirming whether wrecks were indeed slave ships was sometimes a long, drawn-out process and not quite complete, there were often tell-tale signs of a possible slavewreck, like a lot of bricks or ballast stones in the surrounds.
“They would use these stones to offset the weight of the human beings who were in the cargo hold,” Roberts explained.
The searches start with historians paging through reams of archive documents, she said.
“A lot of these wrecks were insured. So, when there’s a wreck, the financial backers, the captain, want their money.“
Claims, investigations and even court cases follow.
“These records help historians narrow down an area. But still, it’s the ocean and stuff still doesn’t stay still in the ocean.”
Archaeologists look for anomalies on the ocean floor and scuba divers go down to examine them.
Any history that can be gleaned from the existence and story of these wrecks is of great value to American-Africans seeking to know more about their ancestors and heritage.
Most have little other than the results of DNA tests, which in Roberts’ case, indicated her ancestors hailed from Benin and Togo.
“With most stories about black folks being of death and pain, I was not really trying to understand much of my ancestry.”
However, with the “responsibility and opportunity” to “bring this history up from the ocean floor, back into collective human memory”, came meeting the few African-Americans who could trace their ancestry. She noticed their sense of pride and confidence.
“They knew specific stories about their ancestors. So they ended up giving me courage to be able to look back at my own ancestry.”
Roberts said people often tend to follow an instinct of burying difficult topics.
“But you can’t move on until you’ve faced that trauma, like any psychologist would probably tell you. You’ve got to look at the pain first and then it decreases and that brings the opportunity for healing.”
One of the ships that Roberts’ divers, from the organisation Divers With Purpose, have worked on lies off Cape Town’s Clifton Beach and was discovered in 2015.
“It was originally from Mozambique and was full of people from the Macua ethnic group.”
The present-day Macua chief gave the divers a container made out of cowrie shells, filled with sand from Mozambique.
“He then charged the team with going back to South Africa and distributing the soil across the wreck site so his ancestors could touch home. It was done by a Mozambican, a South African and an American.”
Roberts said half the people on board the Sao Jose Paquete di Africa died the night it wrecked. They were deep in her thoughts when she visited Cape Town.
“Half were taken ashore and sold back into slavery. I could feel that energy in the air but then I could also feel and imagine the energy from the ceremony and I feel sense of hope, a sense of possibility, a sense of closure. And I also think that is what is possible through this work.
“It seems like it should be tragic, sad work – and it is – but I also think it’s work that brings about healing.
“There’s something about holding and embracing the material evidence from that time so it can’t be denied. It’s an artefact from then.”
A memorable dive for Roberts was off Costa Rica where two Danish slave carriers had sunk, possibly in the early 1700s. Records indicate that the crews mutinied after getting lost in the Caribbean. Slaves ended up escaping to ashore – some being recaptured and others integrating with the indigenous population.
“Most of these ships are not intact. They were made in the 1600s and 1700s, out of wood which means that when they wrecked, they splintered. Over the centuries the ocean reclaimed them. Most of the artefacts are now encrusted in coral or made into homes by marine life or they have been covered in sand.
“But the anchor was there so I got to dive and see the anchor and I also saw the hull of the ship. In Costa Rica there was a brick site, and then, there was this anchor.
“I remember the water in Costa Rica was really warm, a little murky. I didn’t know what I would feel encountering an anchor. I didn’t encounter shackles or some of the other tell-tale signs that I think would be more dramatic. But to dive down and to see that anchor one metre into the water was really – silent – very quiet and meditative.
“I was focused on my breathing when I saw the anchor. It was encrusted in coral so it didn’t really look like an anchor but I knew the stories of those two ships and I knew what happened. So, to encounter that part of this ship and to connect it to that history made me feel some sadness but it also, surprisingly, made me feel empowered and really strong and prideful, proud.”
Elaborating on the void in information about African-Americans’ ancestry, Roberts said genealogists speak of The 1870 Brick Wall.
“Before 1870 the US census did not count identifying details of those who were enslaved. So, when people are trying to look back and find out more, they get stuck. People’s names were stripped. You don’t have any identifying details. So, it’s really hard to get back to a slave ship and then back to Africa.”
When she followed the results of her DNA test to west Africa, she performed a ritual forced upon newly-captured slaves to walking around a “tree of forgetfulness” several times to forget their identity, heritage and culture and become the possession of their new masters.
Roberts also walked through a door of no return: the last place somebody would have gone through before they were put on the ships.
The Independent on Saturday