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.