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BUSH VISIT: RESIDENTS WERE HERDED LIKE SLAVES

Clar Ni Chonghaile | 08.07.2003 21:41 | Anti-racism | Repression | Social Struggles

''IT'S SLAVERY ALL OVER AGAIN ... WE NEVER WANT TO SEE HIM COME HERE
AGAIN ... WE WERE SHUT UP LIKE SHEEP''

''IT'S SLAVERY ALL OVER AGAIN ... WE NEVER WANT TO SEE HIM COME HERE
AGAIN ... WE WERE SHUT UP LIKE SHEEP''


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On Goree Island, Bush Visit Sparks Anger
By Clar Ni Chonghaile
Reuters
Tuesday, July 8, 2003

GOREE ISLAND, Senegal (Reuters) - President Bush made an eloquent speech but did not win many friends during his brief visit to Goree Island off Senegal on Tuesday.

"We are very angry. We didn't even see him," said Fatou N'diaye, a necklace seller watching dignitaries file past to return to the mainland at the end of Bush's tour.


N'diaye and other residents of Goree, site of a famous slave trading station, said they had been taken to a football ground on the other side of the quaint island at 6 a.m. and told to wait there until Bush had departed, around midday.


Bush came to Goree to tour the red-brick Slave House, where Africans were kept in shackles before being shipped across a perilous sea to a lifetime of servitude.


He then gave an eloquent speech about the horrors of slavery, standing at a podium under a sizzling sun near a red-stone museum, topped by cannon pointing out to the sea.


The cooped-up residents were not impressed.


"It's slavery all over again," fumed one father-of-four, who did not want to give his name. "It's humiliating. The island was deserted."


White House officials said the decision to remove the locals was taken by Senegalese authorities. But there was no doubt who the residents blamed.


"We never want to see him come here again," said N'diaye, hiking her loose gown onto her shoulders with a frown.


As the sun rose over Goree before Bush's arrival, the only people to be seen on the main beach were U.S. officials and secret service agents. Frogmen swam through the shallows and hoisted themselves up to peer into brightly painted pirogues.


Normally, the island teems with tourists, Senegal's ubiquitous traders, hawkers of cheap African art, photographers offering to take pictures and all the expected trappings of a tourist hot-spot in one of the world's poorest countries.


On Tuesday, shutters on the yellow and red colonial-style houses remained shut. The cafes were closed and the narrow pier deserted, apart from security agents manning a metal detector, near the sandy beach. A gunship patrolled offshore.


"We understand that you have to have security measures, since September 11, but to dump us in another place...? We had to leave at 6 a.m. I didn't have time to bathe, and the bread did not arrive," the father-of-four said.


"We were shut up like sheep," said 15-year-old Mamadou.


Many residents compared Bush's hour-long visit unfavorably to the island tour by former President Bill Clinton in 1998.


"When Clinton came, he shook hands, people danced," said former Mayor Urbain Alexandre Diagne.


As the Bush roadtrip moved on, Goree was returning to normal with children once again diving into the shallows and clambering over the now inoffensive pirogues.

 http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=584&ncid=584&e=7&u=/nm/20030708/pl_nm/bush_africa_anger_dc

Clar Ni Chonghaile
- Homepage: http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=584&ncid=584&e=7&u=/nm/20030708/pl_nm/bush_africa_anger_dc

Comments

Hide the following 3 comments

Here We Go Again

08.07.2003 23:42

Like I said before, the yanks are after more than oil-also many other resources-including, yet again, cheap(free?) labor. More proof their "manifest destiny" isn't dead-but being extended over the entire globe. Time for the world to organize in defence of the mother continent of the human race-and itself.

STOP NYC Inc.


Welcome...

09.07.2003 00:26

Mr. and Mrs. Bush should go for a casual walk-about, without bodyguards, and get aquainted with the locals in Monrovia or visit a rural village in Malawi and see how the other half lives, off nothing... but Bush won't go near the bush.

His speech was impressive, the scholar who wrote it must have been quite astute and Bush delivered it, almost without a hitch. It's a pity he didn't mean a word of it, except the bit about his "relentless campaign in pursuing terror" i.e. inciting war.

Biko


bushboy perpetrates slavery

25.11.2004 04:19

This human should have been attached to one of the walls in that slave house £ left until the 'rapture'. How much insult can one people take!!! It all too clear by the evacuation of the people, not to mention that he refused to eat their food or use their furnishings, that this being has absolutely no intention of acknowledging the people of Africa with anything but disdain. . . . All that interests this being is plunder £ pillage

Prevoir Candienne