Free Republic

For a black American president on a tour of Africa, it seemed an obvious opportunity for a speech about the evils of slavery. When Barack Obama visited Senegal on Thursday, he headed for Gorée Island, where a crumbling fort is said to have been the key departure point for millions of slaves shipped across the Atlantic. Yet as the president toured the 18th century building and later spoke of how the visit had allowed him to "fully appreciate the magnitude of the slave trade", historians pointed out that it was probably never used for that purpose at all.

The Birth DefectBreakPoint with Charles Colson Slavery and RedemptionYesterday, standing on a spot that was rendered both infamous and hallowed by the slave trade, President Bush called slavery "one of the great crimes of history." But he didn't stop there. He demonstrated that he sees and understands the theme of redemption woven into history: that is, good can come out of the greatest of evils. The president made his remarks on Goree Island off the coast of Senegal. It was from Goree Island that countless thousands of Africans boarded slave ships bound for America. "At this place," Bush said, "liberty...

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...

   Sat 5 Jul 2003 Bush billions designed to buy stability Fred Bridgland SURELY no more symbolic site can be imagined for the beginning of the first visit to Africa by a Republican president. The "Door of No Return", on the tiny Senegalese offshore island of Gorée, is the oak one through which passed many of the 20 million black African men, women and children who were sold into slavery. Yet it is here, amid the memories of chains and shackles, at the door that was carved and erected in the same year as the United States’s independence, 1776,...