An Associated Press photo was flashed around the world last week showing President Bush standing in “The Door of No Return,” the doorway of a slave warehouse on Goree Island, in Senegal, the place from which millions of able-bodied Africans, centuries ago, chained at the neck, unwillingly exited their homeland on their way to a lifetime of slavery in America.
The photo made me think of another trip to Africa, the three-and-a-half years that Keith Richburg, an Black American reporter at The Washington Post, spent in 10 African countries.
In his controversial memoir, “Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa,” Richburg wrote of what he saw in Rwanda:
“If Rwanda was different, it was because the violence, the death, was up close and personal, and unprecedented on the scale of savagery. Here the militias wouldn’t shoot you in the head, Somali style. They would carve off your arm first and watch you bleed and scream in pain. Then, if you didn’t pass out, they would chop off one of your legs, or maybe just a foot. If you were lucky, they might finish you off with a machete blow to the back of the head. Otherwise, they might carve off your ears, your nose, and toss your limbless torso atop the pile of dead bodies, where you could slowly bleed to death.”
Richburg wrote of his cultural disconnect:
“Africa chewed me up and spit me back out again. It took out a machete and slashed into my brain the images that have become my nightmares. I close my eyes now and I am staring at a young woman atop a pile of corpses. I see the grotesquely charred body of a young man set on fire. There is a child, smiling at me, while he aims his loaded grenade launcher at my passing car.”
In The American Enterprise magazine, Richburg wrote of what he saw in Tanzania:
“I watched the dead float down a river in Tanzania. It’s one of those apocryphal stories you always hear coming out of Africa, meant to demonstrate the savagery of ‘the natives.’ Babies being pulled off their mothers’ backs and tossed onto spears. Pregnant women being disemboweled. Bodies being tossed into the river and floating downstream. You heard them all, but never really believed. And yet there I was, drenched with sweat under the blistering sun, standing at the Rusumo Falls bridge, watching the bodies float past me.”
He continues:
“Sometimes they came one by one. Sometimes two or three together. They were bloated now, horribly discolored. Most were naked, or stripped down to their underpants. Sometimes the hands and feet were bound together. Some were missing limbs. And as they went over the falls, a few got stuck together on a little crag, and stayed there flapping against the current, as though they were trying to break free. I couldn’t take my eyes off of the body of a baby. We timed them: a body or two every minute. The Tanzanian border guards told us it had been like that for a couple of days now. These were the victims of the ethnic genocide going on across the border in Rwanda.”
After years of watching these “countless images” of “pretty much the worst that human beings can do to one another, ” Richburg’s mind goes back to Goree Island, the place where President Bush stopped for a photo-op on the first day of his African trip:
“Maybe 400 or so years ago, one of my ancestors was taken from his village, probably by a local chieftain. He was shackled in leg irons, kept in a holding pen or a dark pit, possibly at Goree Island off the coast of Senegal. And then he was put in the crowded, filthy cargo hold of a ship for the long and treacherous voyage across the Atlantic to the New World.”
And the meaning of it all, for Richburg, the feelings:
“Revulsion. Sorrow. Pity. These sentiments began nagging me soon after I first set foot in Africa. It’s a gnawing feeling that I was really unable to express out loud until the end, as I was packing my bags to leave, a feeling I felt pained to admit, a sentiment that, when uttered aloud, might come across as callous, even racist. And yet I know exactly this feeling that haunts me; I’ve just been too embarrassed to say it. So let me drop the charade and put it as simply as I know how: There but for the grace of God go I.”
Richburg explains:
“You see, I was seeing all of this horror a bit differently because of the color of my skin. I am an American, but a black man, a descendant of slaves brought from Africa. When I see these nameless, faceless, anonymous bodies washing over a waterfall or piled up on the back of trucks, what I see most is that they look like me.”
And so, yes, Goree Island represents an enormous crime, a massive theft of life and liberty.
And for Richburg, something more. “Thank God I’m an American,” he writes.
“Thank God my ancestors got out.”
