President Obama Visits Senegal to see where some of the Places where millions of African Slaves were shipped to the USA from and more than half died in the seas.
U.S. President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama stand together at the ‘Door of No Return,’ at the slave house on Goree Island, in Dakar, Senegal, Thursday, June 27, 2013.
Obama is calling his visit to a Senegalese island from which Africans were said to have been shipped across the Atlantic Ocean into slavery, a ‘very powerful moment.’
He was in Dakar Thursday as part of a weeklong trip to Africa, a three-country visit aimed at overcoming disappointment on the continent over the first black U.S. president’s lack of personal engagement during his first term.
GOREE ISLAND, Senegal — Soon after being released from his 27-year incarceration in South Africa, apartheid icon Nelson Mandela made a pilgrimage to this small island off the Senegalese coast.
He came to pay homage to a salmon-colored house which locals claim was used to hold slaves before herding them onto ships bound for America. When the curator showed him a hole underneath the staircase used to punish disobedient slaves, who were left to die in the crawlspace, Mandela himself climbed in.
He re-emerged, his face wet with tears, says Eloi Coly, the museum’s chief conservator, who recalled the impact the experience had on Mandela, just hours before showing the building to President Barack Obama, who visited the structure on Thursday.
For Coly, Mandela’s emotional response underscores the role that this building, known as the House of Slaves, has had on crystalizing the stain that slavery left on humanity.
It’s the place where world leaders go to acknowledge this dark chapter and in addition to Obama, the museum has hosted former Presidents Bill Clinton and George Bush and Pope John Paul II.
From 1501 to 1866, an estimated 12 million slaves from Africa were sent to North America, according to a database created by scholars using shipping records and plantation registers.
More than 6 million of the slaves being shipped died in the seas thrown into the water when they were sick. Slave kids were the worst victims of being dumped into the water by slave masters.
Adongo Ogony is a Human Rights Activist and a Writer who lives in Toronto, Canada
