 Message of UNESCO's Director General for :
"A Virtual Visit to Goree Island : Black Roots"
Gorée island is the historic site on the West African coast where hundreds of thousands of captured men, women and children were rounded up in chains to be shipped to servitude in the New World. This infamous spot is now a universal shrine, where all of us, from every continent, may come and commemorate, in sorrow, the tragedy once inflicted by human beings like us on so many of our own kind. This is why UNESCO has put Gorée island on its World Heritage List ever since 1978, and now observes, on every August 23rd, an "International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition". Gorée's significance and symbolism directly concern us all.
Koïchiro Matsuura
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