Last Wednesday, at the final daily White House news briefing before President Bush began his trip to Africa, I asked Presidential Press Secretary Ari Fleischer:
QUESTION: On March 24, 1998, the BBC reported that near Kampala, when President Clinton said it was wrong to benefit from slavery, Uganda’s president Yoweri Museveni replied: “If anyone should apologize, it should be the African chiefs for capturing their own people and selling them. We still have these traitors today.” And my question: Does President Bush have enough respect for President Museveni that he will speak about those traitors today who hold tens of thousands of black slaves in Sudan and Mauritania; or will he, like the Clintons, avoid saying anything about this horror?
MR. FLEISCHER: Lester, when the president arrives, he will be giving a speech at Goree Island, where many slaves were sold and shipped off. And his speech will speak for itself. I’m not going to preview every aspect of it, but I think it’s a speech that’s worth paying attention to.
On Tuesday morning, I paid very careful attention to the president’s speech on Goree Island in Senegal – 300 miles of whose northern border is shared with the slave nation of Mauritania.
President Bush’s eight-minute speech did not mention the tens of thousands of black slaves held in bondage today, in neighboring Mauritania and in Sudan.
Instead, he said the following, among other things:
“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. …” To which he could have added, “… just as they are today, in your neighboring country Mauritania” – but he said no such thing.
The president also said of history’s slaves in America, “They entered societies indifferent to their anguish and made prosperous by their unpaid labor.” To which he could have added, “… just as the black slaves in Mauritania do today” – but our president said no such thing, as he surely should have.
The president also said, “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.” To which he could have added, “… like the enslavement of blacks in Mauritania and Sudan today” – but, to his shame, he said nothing of the kind.
The president also said, “History moves in the direction of justice. The evils of slavery were accepted and unchanged for centuries.” To which he could have added, “… and I am surely not going to accept the evils of slavery in Mauritania and Sudan today by ignoring them here on Goree Island” – but he said nothing of the kind.
President Bush also declared, “Christian men and women, blind to the clearest commands of their faith and added hypocrisy to injustice.” But Bush is himself a Christian man who strongly denounced historic slavery, while saying absolutely nothing about the black slaves in bondage this very day just across the border in Mauritania.
What is more hypocritical than that?
Contrast Republican Bush to Democrat Elijah Cummings of Baltimore. On the Fourth of July, I asked this chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus about what Bush should address when in Africa:
QUESTION: Do you think [the president] should speak on just slavery in the past? Or should he speak on today’s slavery in Mauritania and Sudan?
REP. CUMMINGS: I think he should speak on both. … I’m very familiar with the slavery situation in the Sudan, and it’s atrocious.
But the undeniable atrocity of black slaves in Sudan was ignored, in Africa, by President George W. Bush.
Les Kinsolving hosts a daily talk show for WCBM in Baltimore. His radio commentaries are syndicated nationally. His show can be heard on the Internet 9-11 p.m. Eastern each weekday. Before going into broadcasting, Kinsolving was a newspaper reporter and columnist – twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for his commentary. Kinsolving's maverick reporting style is chronicled in a book written by his daughter, Kathleen Kinsolving, titled, "Gadfly." Read more of Les Kinsolving's articles here.
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