Alex Haley - Roots - The Saga of an American Family

When I had finished, they said almost with wry amusement, “Well, of course ‘Kamby Bolongo’ would mean Gambia River; anyone would know that.” I told them hotly that no, a great many people wouldn’t know it! Then they showed a much greater interest that my 1760s ancestor had insisted his name was “Kin-tay.” “Our country’s oldest villages tend to be named for the families that settled those villages centuries ago,” they said. Sending for a map, pointing, they said, “Look, here is the village of Kinte-Kundah. And not too far from it, the village of Kinte-Kundah Janneh-Ya.”

Then they told me something of which I’d never have dreamed: of very old men, called griots, still to be found in the older backcountry villages, men who were in effect living, walking archives of oral history. A senior griot would be a man usually in his late sixties or early seventies; below him would be progressively younger griots— and apprenticing boys, so a boy would be exposed to those griots’ particular line of narrative for forty or fifty years before he could qualify as a senior griot, who told on special occasions the centuries-old histories of villages, of clans, of families, of great heroes. Throughout the whole of black Africa such oral chronicles had been handed down since the time of the ancient forefathers, I was informed, and there were certain legendary griots who could narrate facets of African history literally for as long as three days without ever repeating themselves.

Seeing how astounded I was, these Gambian men reminded me that every living person ancestrally goes back to some time and some place where no writing existed; and then human memories and mouths and ears were the only ways those human beings could store and relay information. They said that we who live in the Western culture are so conditioned to the “crutch of print” that few among us comprehend what a trained memory is capable of.

Since my forefather had said his name was “Kin-tay”—properly spelled “Kinte,” they said—and since the Kinte clan was old and well known in The Gambia, they promised to do what they could to find a griot who might be able to assist my search.

Back in the United States, I began devouring books on African history. It grew quickly into some kind of obsession to correct my ignorance concerning the earth’s second-largest continent. It embarrasses me to this day that up to then my images about Africa had been largely derived or inferred from Tarzan movies and my very little authentic knowledge had come from only occasional leafings through the National Geographic . All of a sudden now, after reading all day, I’d sit on the edge of my bed at night studying a map of Africa, memorizing the different countries’ relative positions and the principal waters where slave ships had operated.

After some weeks, a registered letter came from The Gambia; it suggested that when possible, I should come back. But by now I was stony broke—especially because I’d been investing very little of my time in writing.

Once at a Reader’s Digest lawn party, cofounder Mrs. Dewit Wallace had told me how much she liked an “Unforgettable Character” I had written—about a tough old seadog cook who had once been my boss in the U. S. Coast Guard—and before leaving, Mrs. Wallace volunteered that I should let her know if I ever needed some help. Now I wrote to Mrs. Wallace a rather embarrassed letter, briefly telling her the compulsive quest I’d gotten myself into. She asked some editors to meet with me and see what they felt, and invited to lunch with them, I talked about nonstop for nearly three hours. Shortly afterward, a letter told me that the Reader’s Digest would provide me with a three-hundred-dollar monthly check for one year, and plus that—my really vital need—“reasonable necessary travel expenses.”

I again visited Cousin Georgia in Kansas City—something had urged me to do so, and I found her quite ill. But she was thrilled to hear both what I had learned and what I hoped to learn. She wished me Godspeed, and I flew then to Africa.

The same men with whom I had previously talked told me now in a rather matter-of-fact manner that they had caused word to be put out in the back country, and that a griot very knowledgeable of the Kinte clan had indeed been found—his name, they said, was “Kebba Kanji Fofana.” I was ready to have a fit. “Where is he?” They looked at me oddly. “He’s in his village.”

I discovered that if I intended to see this griot , I was going to have to do something I’d never have dreamed I’d ever be doing—organizing what seemed, at least to me then, a kind of minisafari! It took me three days of negotiating through unaccustomed endless African palaver finally to hire a launch to get upriver; to rent a lorry and a Land-Rover to take supplies by a roundabout land route; to hire finally a total of fourteen people, including three interpreters and four musicians, who had told me that the old griots in the back country wouldn’t talk without music in the background.

In the launch Baddibu , vibrating up the wide, swift “Kamby Bolongo,” I felt queasily, uncomfortably alien. Did they all have me appraised as merely another pith helmet? Finally ahead was James Island, for two centuries the site of a fort over which England and France waged war back and forth for the ideal vantage point to trade in slaves. Asking if we might land there awhile, I trudged amid the crumbling ruins yet guarded by ghostly cannon. Picturing in my mind the kinds of atrocities that would have happened there, I felt as if I would like to go flailing an ax back through that facet of black Africa’s history. Without luck I tried to find for myself some symbol remnant of an ancient chain, but I took a chunk of mortar and a brick. In the next minutes before we returned to the Baddibu , I just gazed up and down that river that my ancestor had named for his daughter far across the Atlantic Ocean in Spotsylvania County, Virginia. Then we went on, and upon arriving at a little village called Albreda, we put ashore, our destination now on foot the yet smaller village of Juffure, where the men had been told that this griot lived.

There is an expression called “the peak experience”—that which emotionally, nothing in your life ever transcends. I’ve had mine, that first day in the back country of black West Africa.

When we got within sight of Juffure, the children who were playing outside gave the alert, and the people came flocking from their huts. It’s a village of only about seventy people. Like most backcountry villages, it was still very much as it was two hundred years ago, with its circular mud houses and their conical thatched roofs! Among the people as they gathered was a small man wearing an off white robe, a pillbox hat over an aquiline-featured black face, and about him was an aura of “somebodiness” until I knew he was the man we had come to see and hear.

As the three interpreters left our party to converge upon him, the seventy-odd other villagers gathered closely around me, in a kind of horseshoe pattern, three or four deep all around; had I stuck out my arms, my fingers would have touched the nearest ones on either side. They were all staring at me. The eyes just raked me. Their foreheads were furrowed with their very intensity of staring. A kind of visceral surging or a churning sensation started up deep inside me; bewildered, I was wondering what on earth was this ... then in a little while it was rather as if some full-gale force of realization rolled in on me: Many times in my life I had been among crowds of people, but never where every one was jet black!