George W. Bush at Goree Island: American Slavery and the Rhetoric of Redemption

Abstract

On July 8, 2003, at Goree Island, Senegal, George W. Bush delivered the most important speech on American slavery since Abraham Lincoln. As an example of rhetorical artistry, the speech is a masterpiece, putting the brutality of slavery into historical, political, and theological perspective. Although the speech had deliberative effects—it grew out of, and contributed to, the Millennium Challenge as well as the administration's African AIDS initiative—it was primarily an epideictic speech that envisioned Providential history as its audience. By adopting the God of history as audience, Bush was able to confess the nation's original sin and to begin to make amends by directing billions of dollars to African development as well as treatment of AIDS and malaria. While largely successful with Africans, the speech left many African Americans both puzzled and angry. The Bush administration could have built on the initial success of the Goree Island speech by extending the internal logic of the address to the material conditions of African Americans, but it did not.