SECRETARY-GENERAL CALLS 'GATE OF NO RETURN' SYMBOL OF AFRICA'S TRAGIC PAST, THRESHOLD FOR BEGINNING OF CONTINENT'S RENEWAL

Press Release
SG/SM/5827

SECRETARY-GENERAL CALLS 'GATE OF NO RETURN' SYMBOL OF AFRICA'S TRAGIC PAST, THRESHOLD FOR BEGINNING OF CONTINENT'S RENEWAL

Following is the text of the statement made by the Secretary-General at Ouidah, Benin, on the occasion of the inauguration of the "Gate of No Return" on 30 November:

Here begins the tragedy of a nation, the tragedy of a continent. Not only does Ouidah symbolize the negation of the values of a race, it embodies above all the weaknesses and the unreason of the human species. For ever, mankind will bear the stigmata of the slave trade as the height of contempt, hatred, enslavement and the domination of man by man.

By making the "Gate of No Return" a reality, the Republic of Benin and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) are restoring to an entire nation its right to remember and its duty of historical remembrance. Millions of men and women left these shores for an unknown destination, for distant lands. Some of them, victims of disease, maltreatment or physical elimination, never arrived. I know that this Gate itself is built on the bones of those who, unable to stand the anguish of waiting, sought to regain their freedom. We must ponder the fate of these women and these men with a deep feeling of respect.

The question is sometimes asked what Africa would have become without this barbaric contact which perverse intellectuals sometimes seek to idealize. My answer is that it would not have lost millions of its most energetic sons who would have perpetuated the impressive surge of progress that took place in the African empires from the dawn of the ninth century. It would have made a greater contribution to what Teilhard de Chardin called the civilization of the universal. It would have preserved from disappearance a large part of the findings of its scholars, and from oblivion the vast cultural and artistic treasure which would have been more harmoniously transmitted from generation to generation. The slave trade was a pump which violently drained off what was fine, great and noble in this continent -- freedom. As Etienne de la Boétie said, "Freedom is a commodity so precious that once it is gone, every evil ensues". These African evils go by the names of economic backwardness, cultural alienation, psychological complex.

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I am not idealizing the African continent, in the emotion of this inauguration, beyond what it would have been in reality. I am, quite simply, convinced that Africa is the repository of human values which have never suggested to it, throughout the course of history, enslaving others, persecuting others or denying others their culture and their civilization. This is also the reason why Africa must rehabilitate itself by focusing its will and its sacrifices with religious zeal on all the psychological and material obstacles that impede its flowering, its expansion and its development. This calls for a joint effort by the Africans living on the continent and those of the diaspora. The similarities in many respects between Africa and the American continent will always be there to remind our brothers across the Atlantic of their roots.

Voodoo, to which you, Mr. President, devoted the first festival bearing that name, held in February 1993, constitutes in this connection one of the greatest common denominators between Haiti and Benin. What can one say of the dances and the music that overlap in a hymn to Afro-American cultural identity. This identity was the foundation on which Black African literature was built. Let us salute together the work of Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Sengho and Padmore, to mention only these poets of the African identity, a monument of collective awareness and recognition of inherent values.

Here in Ouidah, the symbol of despoiled, exploited, dominated and humiliated Africa, Africans must remember the past, but they must also think of the future. The African genius is inexhaustible on condition that an end is put to the tribal wars which are another consequence of the past. African intellectuals, scientists, poets, painters, university teachers, craftsmen and artists must pool their vast talents in order to stop underdevelopment. In this respect, the "Gate of No Return" is the threshold from which our renewal will be able to set forth. I would even call it a gate open to other cultures in order to build a better world, a world free from enslavement, discrimination, racism and exclusion.

I cannot conclude without paying tribute to President Nicéphore Soglo, whose personal inspiration, together with that of the Director-General of UNESCO, Federico Mayor, made it possible to construct this monument which now acknowledges the suffering of a people and also seeks to be the most worthy dedication to the reconciliation of peoples.

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