President Bush Speaks at Goree Island in Senegal
Remarks by the President on Goree Island
Goree Island, Senegal
11:47 A.M. (Local)
THE PRESIDENT: Mr. President and Madam First Lady, distinguished guests and residents of Goree Island, citizens of
Senegal, I'm honored to begin my visit to Africa in your beautiful country.
For hundreds of years on this island peoples of different continents met in fear and cruelty. Today we gather in respect
and friendship, mindful of past wrongs and dedicated to the advance of human liberty.
At this place, liberty and life were stolen and sold. Human beings were delivered and sorted, and weighed, and branded
with the marks of commercial enterprises, and loaded as cargo on a voyage without return. One of the largest migrations
of history was also one of the greatest crimes of history.
Below the decks, the middle passage was a hot, narrow, sunless nightmare; weeks and months of confinement and abuse and
confusion on a strange and lonely sea. Some refused to eat, preferring death to any future their captors might prepare
for them. Some who were sick were thrown over the side. Some rose up in violent rebellion, delivering the closest thing
to justice on a slave ship. Many acts of defiance and bravery are recorded. Countless others, we will never know.
Those who lived to see land again were displayed, examined, and sold at auctions across nations in the Western
Hemisphere. They entered societies indifferent to their anguish and made prosperous by their unpaid labor. There was a
time in my country's history when one in every seven human beings was the property of another. In law, they were
regarded only as articles of commerce, having no right to travel, or to marry, or to own possessions. Because families
were often separated, many denied even the comfort of suffering together.
For 250 years the captives endured an assault on their culture and their dignity. The spirit of Africans in America did
not break. Yet the spirit of their captors was corrupted. Small men took on the powers and airs of tyrants and masters.
Years of unpunished brutality and bullying and rape produced a dullness and hardness of conscience. Christian men and
women became blind to the clearest commands of their faith and added hypocrisy to injustice. A republic founded on
equality for all became a prison for millions. And yet in the words of the African proverb, "no fist is big enough to
hide the sky." All the generations of oppression under the laws of man could not crush the hope of freedom and defeat
the purposes of God.
In America, enslaved Africans learned the story of the exodus from Egypt and set their own hearts on a promised land of
freedom. Enslaved Africans discovered a suffering Savior and found he was more like themselves than their masters.
Enslaved Africans heard the ringing promises of the Declaration of Independence and asked the self-evident question,
then why not me?
In the year of America's founding, a man named Olaudah Equiano was taken in bondage to the New World. He witnessed all
of slavery's cruelties, the ruthless and the petty. He also saw beyond the slave-holding piety of the time to a higher
standard of humanity. "God tells us," wrote Equiano, "that the oppressor and the oppressed are both in His hands. And if
these are not the poor, the broken-hearted, the blind, the captive, the bruised which our Savior speaks of, who are
they?"
Down through the years, African Americans have upheld the ideals of America by exposing laws and habits contradicting
those ideals. The rights of African Americans were not the gift of those in authority. Those rights were granted by the
Author of Life, and regained by the persistence and courage of African Americans, themselves.
Among those Americans was Phyllis Wheatley, who was dragged from her home here in West Africa in 1761, at the age of
seven. In my country, she became a poet, and the first noted black author in our nation's history. Phyllis Wheatley
said, "In every human breast, God has implanted a principle which we call love of freedom. It is impatient of oppression
and pants for deliverance."
That deliverance was demanded by escaped slaves named Frederick Douglas and Sojourner Truth, educators named Booker T.
Washington and W.E.B. DuBois, and ministers of the Gospel named Leon Sullivan and Martin Luther King, Jr. At every turn,
the struggle for equality was resisted by many of the powerful. And some have said we should not judge their failures by
the standards of a later time. Yet, in every time, there were men and women who clearly saw this sin and called it by
name.
We can fairly judge the past by the standards of President John Adams, who called slavery "an evil of callosal
magnitude." We can discern eternal standards in the deeds of William Wilberforce and John Quincy Adams, and Harriet
Beecher Stowe, and Abraham Lincoln. These men and women, black and white, burned with a zeal for freedom, and they left
behind a different and better nation. Their moral vision caused Americans to examine our hearts, to correct our
Constitution, and to teach our children the dignity and equality of every person of every race. By a plan known only to
Providence, the stolen sons and daughters of Africa helped to awaken the conscience of America. The very people traded
into slavery helped to set America free.
My nation's journey toward justice has not been easy and it is not over. The racial bigotry fed by slavery did not end
with slavery or with segregation. And many of the issues that still trouble America have roots in the bitter experience
of other times. But however long the journey, our destination is set: liberty and justice for all.
In the struggle of the centuries, America learned that freedom is not the possession of one race. We know with equal
certainty that freedom is not the possession of one nation. This belief in the natural rights of man, this conviction
that justice should reach wherever the sun passes leads America into the world.
With the power and resources given to us, the United States seeks to bring peace where there is conflict, hope where
there is suffering, and liberty where there is tyranny. And these commitments bring me and other distinguished leaders
of my government across the Atlantic to Africa.
African peoples are now writing your own story of liberty. Africans have overcome the arrogance of colonial powers,
overturned the cruelties of apartheid, and made it clear that dictatorship is not the future of any nation on this
continent. In the process, Africa has produced heroes of liberation -- leaders like Mandela, Senghor, Nkrumah, Kenyatta,
Selassie and Sadat. And many visionary African leaders, such as my friend, have grasped the power of economic and
political freedom to lift whole nations and put forth bold plans for Africa's development.
Because Africans and Americans share a belief in the values of liberty and dignity, we must share in the labor of
advancing those values. In a time of growing commerce across the globe, we will ensure that the nations of Africa are
full partners in the trade and prosperity of the world. Against the waste and violence of civil war, we will stand
together for peace. Against the merciless terrorists who threaten every nation, we will wage an unrelenting campaign of
justice. Confronted with desperate hunger, we will answer with human compassion and the tools of human technology. In
the face of spreading disease, we will join with you in turning the tide against AIDS in Africa.
We know that these challenges can be overcome, because history moves in the direction of justice. The evils of slavery
were accepted and unchanged for centuries. Yet, eventually, the human heart would not abide them. There is a voice of
conscience and hope in every man and woman that will not be silenced -- what Martin Luther King called a certain kind of
fire that no water could put out. That flame could not be extinguished at the Birmingham jail. It could not be stamped
out at Robben Island Prison. It was seen in the darkness here at Goree Island, where no chain could bind the soul. This
untamed fire of justice continues to burn in the affairs of man, and it lights the way before us.
May God bless you all. (Applause.)