This winter break, I spent a week in one of the most remote places on Earth: St. Helena Island, nearly 7,000 miles off the coast of Cape Town, South Africa. What I saw and experienced there will stay with me for a long time. Living in isolation from the rest of the world changed something within me, through conversation, landscape, and a different way of moving through time.
I came to St. Helena through a SNF Paideia anthropology class taught by Professor Deborah Thomas, Middle Passages and Return. Before arriving, I understood the title largely as a historical and theoretical framework. On the island, it became something lived. St. Helena is not simply a site connected to the transatlantic slave trade. It is a place where movement, rupture, and return are embedded in everyday life, and where history is not only archived but negotiated daily by the people who live on it.
Most people outside the island know St. Helena through a single story: Napoleon, whose exile and death have come to dominate how the island is imagined within a European narrative of empire. That story appears everywhere in guidebooks and popular memory, and while it is undeniably part of the island’s past, it is far from the most consequential one. What this fixation often obscures is that, decades after Napoleon’s death, St. Helena became a central site in the South Atlantic during Britain’s efforts to suppress the transatlantic slave trade. Between the mid-nineteenth century and the 1870s, an estimated 26,000 to 30,000 Africans were brought to the island after British naval patrols intercepted slave ships, many arriving severely ill, malnourished, or dying, and thousands did not survive. Today, historians estimate that at least 8,000 bodies are known to be buried on the island, a staggering number when set against a present-day population of roughly 4,000. Framing St. Helena primarily through Napoleon flattens the island into a curiosity and pushes aside these deeper, more uncomfortable histories of slavery, forced migration, indentured labor, and survival after empire.
The first thing I noticed when we arrived was the ocean. At first, it terrified me. For thousands of miles in every direction, there was nothing but water. The island felt impossibly small, and I felt exposed in a way I had never felt before. I kept thinking about how easy it would be to disappear here, how far removed we were from the rest of the world. But as the week passed, my relationship to the ocean changed. By the time I was preparing to leave, I was sad to let it go. The ocean no longer felt like a threat. It felt like a protector, a steady presence that held the island in place – Fear gave way to trust.
St. Helena is often described as isolated, yet I rarely felt isolated there. That contradiction forced me to rethink what isolation actually means. Is isolation about physical distance, or is it about social disconnection? On an island where a plane arrives once a week and a ship comes roughly once a month, where supply chains are fragile and weather determines possibility, you might expect loneliness. Instead, I found density. People know each other. People talk to each other. Strangers become familiar quickly, and conversation is not rushed or transactional.
This is not a place where anonymity thrives, but rather one where visibility is woven into everyday life through recognition, memory, and conversation. People ask questions and expect answers, remember your name, and wave when you pass by, creating a sense of social closeness that felt strikingly different from my life back at Penn, where the undergraduate population alone is more than double the entire population of St. Helena, yet where it is still easy to feel anonymous within crowds, institutions, and routines. On the island, that anonymity dissolved quickly, and by the end of the week something simple but profound had shifted. I was calmer, more open, and more willing to linger in conversation without needing a reason, so much so that leaving felt strange. Even now, I catch myself wanting to wave at passing cars or expecting strangers to stop and talk, as if we have known each other forever.
The island’s history complicates easy narratives about identity in ways that are difficult to capture through external categories alone. St. Helena is often described as a color-blind society, not because difference is absent, but because most people on the island share deeply mixed ancestry that resists simple racial classification. Through conversations, museum interpretation, and even DNA testing that some islanders have undertaken, we saw how African, Indian, European, and Chinese lineages coexist within single family histories. This mixing reflects not only the legacy of slavery, but also later systems of labor, including Indian and Chinese indentured workers who were brought to the island under British colonial rule. One phrase that stayed with me was “half master, half slave,” a stark and unsettling way some saints describe ancestry shaped simultaneously by domination and survival, capturing how the empire lives on not as a clean moral binary, but as something inherited, intimate, and unresolved.
Working with the National Trust on the island deepened my understanding of how St. Helena engages with its past while also living firmly in the present. Sites like Rupert’s Valley confront the brutality of the slave trade directly, grounding abstract histories in physical remains and landscape. The burial grounds at Rupert’s Valley constitute the largest known excavated cemetery of formerly enslaved Africans in the South Atlantic world and represent one of the only places where this history exists as physical, archaeological evidence rather than solely in ship logs or colonial archives. This weight is further complicated by the fact that St. Helena is a British Overseas Territory that remains financially dependent on the United Kingdom, relying on annual UK aid to sustain public services and infrastructure, a reminder that colonial relationships do not simply end, but transform. This is not a past that can be romanticized or softened, and yet the way the island remembers does not always align with what international academic or humanitarian frameworks expect.
There is a tendency, especially from the outside, to assume that acknowledgment must look a certain way. That communities marked by slavery must constantly center trauma, must narrate themselves primarily through suffering, and must make their history legible in forms recognizable to global audiences. St. Helena complicates that assumption. The island does acknowledge its past, but it does so on its own terms. Through art, through ritual, through education, and through quiet acts of care that do not always translate easily into academic language.
Children painting stones white and pressing fingerprints onto them to represent caskets beneath the ground is not denial. It is remembrance that makes space for living. Even local history books are explicit about the violence of the past. What differs is not whether the past is known, but how people choose to live alongside it. This made me increasingly wary of international academic and humanitarian frameworks. While they can be powerful tools for exposing injustice, they can also be dangerous when imposed without care. They risk turning living communities into case studies and grief into an obligation. They risk demanding that people constantly reopen wounds for the sake of global recognition. Sometimes, what appears as distance from the past is not ignorance but self-preservation.
One moment that crystallized this tension was a dialogue we had about the film A Story of Bones. Internationally, the film has been widely acclaimed for bringing attention to the remains discovered during airport construction on St. Helena. Yet many Saints expressed discomfort with it. The issue was not that the history itself was unimportant, but that the story was told by outsiders—framed through an external lens and circulated globally in ways that left the local community feeling misrepresented. Our group pushed back on this perspective, which led to a thoughtful and constructive dialogue about race, skin color, and historical interpretation. In particular, we discussed how American understandings of race—often rigid and deeply tied to visual markers—differ from how race is perceived and lived on St. Helena. That conversation did not give me a neat conclusion. What it offered instead was a sharper understanding that telling the truth is not only about facts, but also about who speaks, who listens, and who ultimately lives with the consequences of representation.
Another striking aspect of the island was its relationship to time and crisis. There was no COVID on St. Helena. The island closed itself off early, using its remoteness as protection. That decision revealed something important: isolation, when controlled and intentional, can be a form of care. Remoteness here is not simply a disadvantage. It is also a resource, one that can be mobilized to protect community life.
Outside the heavy sites and difficult conversations, I learned a different set of lessons that were quieter, but no less profound, through moments of joy, music, and collective ease. Karaoke nights at the Oriental Tree and dancing at Dani’s were not distractions from the island’s history, but reminders that joy, humor, and social connection are also part of how communities endure. Singing badly, laughing freely, and moving together in small crowded spaces made the island feel alive in a way no archive could, reinforcing that St. Helena is not only a place of memory, but a place of ongoing life.
By the end of the week, something simple but profound had shifted within me. I felt more at ease and more present. I learned not to shrink my curiosity or silence my instinct to explore. The island rewarded attention. It gave back what I put into it.
To be surrounded by saints, the people of St. Helena, has been one of the greatest honors of my life. I do not know if I will ever make the trek back to that small island in the middle of the ocean. But I do know that the memories will stay with me. The ocean, once frightening, now feels like something I carry inside me, steady, vast, and quietly protective. And maybe that is the real gift St. Helena gave me: a reminder that even at the edge of the world, you can feel deeply at home.
Tanisha Agrawal (C’28) is an SNF Paideia Fellow majoring in International Relations and Cognitive Science.
