US Secretary of State Yellen visits infamous ‘Home of Slaves’ in Senegal

US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen the salmon-coloured home on an island off Senegal on Saturday that is among the most recognised symbols of the horrors of the Atlantic slave commerce.

It’s a part of a 10-day journey geared toward rebuilding financial relationships between the USA and Africa.

The constructing was often called the Home of Slaves from which tens of tens of millions of Africans had been shipped throughout the Atlantic; by no means to return. 

Yellen mentioned: “Gorée and the trans-Atlantic slave commerce will not be simply part of African historical past. They’re part of American historical past as properly. 

“We all know that the tragedy didn’t cease with the technology of people taken from right here. Even after slavery was abolished, Black People — a lot of whom can hint their descendants by way of ports like this throughout Africa — had been denied the rights and freedoms promised to them beneath our Structure.”

Within the US, African slaves and their kids contributed to the constructing of the nation’s most storied establishments, together with the White Home and Capitol, in line with the White Home Historic Affiliation.

Yellen acknowledged the continued ramifications of that brutal previous and the survival of a lot of its victims.

“In the USA, what’s exceptional is what number of African-American women and men overcame the chances, created higher lives for themselves and their descendants and have become central to our economic system and democracy, constructing our cities, powering our industries and bending the conscience of the USA and the world towards justice and all of this within the face of systemic social and financial injustice,” she mentioned.

Yellen’s journey to the island is one which many dignitaries have made, together with former US presidents Barack Obama and Invoice Clinton and South Africa’s Nelson Mandela.