I like the word ephemera. It is used in the book and antique business to mean non-book paper items related to a particular period, such as hippy posters and Berkeley free speech political flyers.
Today’s NYTimes is being as snotty as the New Yorker, reporting that President Bush doesn’t hang out much when he is traveling. The Queen of Snotty Dailies said that the President spent thirty minutes at the Great Wall of China and twenty minutes at Gore Island in Senegal.
Count me in with the President. Those are my times too.
I saw the Great Wall, walked around on it for a few minutes and went back to sit down, drink a Coke, and talk to other people who were waiting for our tour bus back to town. One couple talked about the second granddaughter they had adopted in China and the associated heart problem the child had. The Great Wall is thousands of kilometers long and was built thousands of years ago. Nothing about seeing it conveys either of those astounding facts.
Seeing the Great Wall helped me understand modern China, even in less than the thirty minutes I spent looking at it. It said to me: ‘give the Chinese the resources and they can build anything.’ The proof was seeing Shanghai. Shanghai is the modern day proof of that statement.
Gore Island is a tourist scam. The historic site is a small mud and brick shack with a dozen rooms on an Island about half an hour by ferry from Dakar. 
I know American slave history and I know 18th Century West African history.
Most American slaves came from Brazil and the Caribbean. Few came directly from Africa. Most importantly the slaves in the Americas came from the entire Ivory and Gold Coast, a tiny fraction of them came from Senegal. The slaves shipped to the Americas were nearly all slaves captured by Africans and sold at auction on the coast for shipment to the Americas.
Looking at Gore Island as the jumping off point for slave exports would be like looking at Plymouth, England as the jumping off point for European immigration to America. Twenty minutes was more than enough time.