When Barry told me about this story he had found in the foreign press (Reuters Asia), I really thought it was manufactured.

Bush's handlers arranged a photo-op this week on the island of Goree, where Americans and others once confined Africans who were to be transported around the world as slaves. The objective this time was to demonstrate that our president is definitely against slavery, but in order to stage the theatrical scene, every resident of the island was rounded up at dawn and confined to a stadium for the duration of the great man's visit.

N'diaye and other residents of Goree, site of a famous slave trading station, said they had been taken to a football ground on the other side of the quaint island at 6 a.m. and told to wait there until Bush had departed, around midday.

Bush came to Goree to tour the red-brick Slave House, where Africans were kept in shackles before being shipped across a perilous sea to a lifetime of servitude.

He then gave an eloquent speech about the horrors of slavery, standing at a podium under a sizzling sun near a red-stone museum, topped by cannon pointing out to the sea.