Celso Simbine walks briskly along the narrow streets of Stone Town in Ilha de Mozambique off the country’s north coast, a diving tank on his shoulder and a bag of scuba equipment on his back. Twelve years ago Simbine couldn’t swim, despite growing up in a port city. Today, the 32-year-old is joining colleagues on a nearby beach to embark on a diving expedition in the Indian Ocean. They include a fellow Mozambican, a Senegalese and a Brazilian – all young, black maritime archaeologists who are part of an international team exploring what they believe to be the wreck of an 18th-century slave ship.
The team has gathered in Mozambique for two weeks of exploratory dives and classroom sessions coordinated by the Slave Wrecks Project (SWP), a programme dedicated to searching for slave ship wrecks globally and to training Africans and people of African descent in underwater archaeology in a drive to equip communities with the knowledge and resources to identify, preserve and tell the stories of the wrecks in their waters.
