Posted on 07/06/2003 5:38:35 PM PDT by Pokey78
The curator of the slave house on Gorée Island, just off Dakar at Africa's westernmost tip, is well used to famous visitors.
"The Pope, Nelson Mandela, Bill Clinton," says Joseph Ndiaye, 79, reeling off the names in his office, bedecked with paraphernalia from the days when the island served as a prison for hundreds of slaves awaiting transportation to the New World.
Since serving as a parachutist with the Senegalese army during the Second World War, Mr Ndiaye has made the slave house his life's work, a site of pilgrimage, he calls it, for European, American and African visitors.
Tomorrow he will give his practised and moving tour to President George W Bush and his wife, Laura, who will visit at the start of a five-country tour of Africa.
He will raise the 17lb weight used to prevent prisoners from fleeing, demonstrate the neck rings and leg irons and show his visitors the doorway through which the slaves would pass when they left their prison for their long ocean passage.
The Pope lingered at this doorway in 1992 when he visited to apologise for the slave trade and its acceptance by Catholic missionaries.
When Mr Mandela arrived in 1991, he asked to be left alone for several minutes in the airless isolation cell used for insubordinate slaves and emerged visibly shaken by the experience.
By electing to speak on Goree Island Mr Bush is following in the footsteps of Mr Clinton, who visited in 1998 and, with his back to the Atlantic, spoke of an African resurgence and the "beauty and intelligence, energy and spirit" of the continent.
Since then West Africa has regressed, with conflicts in Liberia, the Ivory Coast and Sierra Leone.
But Mr Bush is promising money, tied to democratic reforms, and billions of dollars to fight Aids.
He also has the surprising endorsement of Bob Geldof, who on a visit to Africa last month called the Bush administration "the most radical - in a positive sense - in its approach to Africa since Kennedy".
Sadly, security concerns mean that Mr Bush will be unable to meet local people, as Mr Clinton did.
He will not even venture into Dakar, Sengal's capital, but will be visited by President Abdoulaye Wade and several other African heads of state near the airport.
The 400 permanent residents of Goree Island have been told by the army to close up their homes from dawn tomorrow until Mr Bush has left, and gather beneath a marquee in the town square. Every building in town must be shut.
Yesterday, however, Goree's colourful port bustled with White House scouting groups and event planners overseeing the construction of a stage for the president while fending off persistent squads of children hawking bead necklaces.
Goree is a paradisaical spot, 20 minutes by ferry from Dakar, where children cartwheel off the jetty into the sea, the buildings are painted rust red and turquoise and bougainvillea spills into the streets. But its slave history remains its main draw.
Each year, large groups of black Americans visit to retrace their ancestors' passage, inspired, said Mr Ndiaye, by Alex Haley's novel Roots.
Yesterday the visitors in the small courtyard were mostly French.
Asked if he was looking forward to Mr Bush's visit, Mr Ndiaye said: "It is more important that everyone visiting knows the extent of what happened.
"We all know about the Holocaust, but slavery lasted for hundreds of years and the people who come here are still learning about it."
As for the Slaves that came to the US, in no other country in the World have the Slaves had the opportunity and took advantage of the opportunity that is available in this country. Senators, Congressmen, Supreme Court Judges, Corp Execs, on and on.
Mrs VS
It is unacceptable to me that Dubya won't go where Clinton did, and a block further.
As documented in the book "The Slave Trade", it was the Muslim Koranic requirement for Purdah, or seclusion of females which practically mandated that black eunuchs be employed. Thus, the Trans Sahara Route, to Muslim Cities in or near Arabia prediminated. Since the castration of the male slaves took place at a waystation in the Sahara, there are no indiginous populations of African Blacks anywhere in Arabia.
For the vast majority of those who took the Trans Atlantic Route were never subject to emasculation, we have thriving African populations throughout the New World.
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