CHAPTER TWO

The Gambia

“The Union Jack fluttered down over Gambia at midnight this morning,” the New York Times reported on February 18, 1965, “bringing an end to the last outpost of colonial rule in West Africa and giving Africa its smallest and poorest independent state.”1 From its coast on the Atlantic Ocean, the Gambia stretches three hundred miles east in a narrow strip of land surrounded by Senegal. (The country is referred to as “the Gambia” to differentiate it from the river after which the country was named.) The Gambia River made the country a small but important trading post, first for the Portuguese and later for the French and British. These European powers fought over control of the territory and transported hundreds of thousands of enslaved people from the country’s ports from the mid-1600s to the early 1800s. In 1965, the British paid for half the cost of the fireworks display to celebrate Gambia’s independence but left the country politically and economically unstable. “We are entering into independence with many grave problems,” said David Jawara, the Gambia’s first prime minister.² When Alex Haley’s ancestral quest led him to the Gambia two years later, Gambian officials were eager to help and hoped that the author’s search for roots would benefit the newly independent nation.

Haley first identified the Gambia as his ancestral home while touring the West Coast to promote The Autobiography of Malcolm X in December 1965. Haley told San Francisco Chronicle literary editor William Hogan that he believed his ancestor had arrived in South Carolina from the Gambia in 1766.3 Haley had previously identified his original African ancestor as “the Mandinka” (or simply “the African”). While Haley later claimed that several fortuitous research finds in 1966 pointed him to the Gambia, it is likely that he identified the Gambia, among other West African nations, because the Mandinka ethnic group made up a large percentage of the Gambia’s population. He may also have focused on the Gambia after reading the work of Scottish explorer Mungo Park, who focused on the Gambia River in parts of Travels in the Interior of Africa (1799) and later works (Haley’s archives include several photocopies from Park’s books, and Park is the source that appears most frequently in Haley’s notes on the history of the Gambia).⁴ Whatever the case, once Haley settled on the Gambia the country assumed a mythic importance in his research for Before This Anger.

In August 1966, Haley wrote Ken McCormick, his editor at Doubleday, to promise that the manuscript would be completed soon and mentioned his intention of traveling to the Gambia. “I plan to travel-write the last chapter—to Gambia, Africa,” Haley wrote, “to walk by the river where the old slave-loading station is located; thence by ship across the old slave-trade route; thence by car, to walk on the ground of each of the former plantations where my forebears were slaves.” Haley called this chapter “Sentimental Journey” and anticipated that writing it would be an “emotional experience.”5 To prepare for his trip, Haley went to the Gambian embassy in Washington, D.C., and sought out Gambian exchange students, both in the nation’s capital and closer to his new home in upstate New York, to talk with them about his research. “All are fascinated,” he said. “They assure me high-level entrée in their country, assure me every cooperation. I have just got to get there, symbolically to visit physically where that slave ship loaded my great x7-grandfather.”⁶

Funding for the trip would come not from Doubleday but from an agreement Haley’s agent Paul Reynolds negotiated with Reader’s Digest. In exchange for the rights to publish advance excerpts of Before This Anger, Reader’s Digest provided Haley with much-needed money for research travel and living expenses. “I couldn’t tell you, really, how much this whole arrangement means to me, both the subsidy and the heightened incentive!” Haley told Reynolds. “Working with the meager resources I had, the more I researched, the more I came to realize what I could have as a book, if I could go all out. And now I can! Golly, even the travel: to Africa, and other places I need to go, for this, for that—to make this book a landmark. I make you a prediction, friend. I won’t come right out and call the name of the Prize. I just say to you: you just watch what we are going to win! Because just ain’t never been a book like this one!”⁷

In the story Haley told on the lecture circuit and repeated in the last chapter of Roots, he described how he had fortuitously met a student from the Gambia. Haley said that after anthropologist Jan Vansina had deciphered the Mandinka words from Haley’s family stories and pointed him toward the Gambia, a professor who invited Haley to speak at Utica College mentioned that there was an outstanding student from the Gambia at nearby Hamilton College. According to the account in Roots, Haley drove the half hour to Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, to ask about this student. “Before I could finish asking, a Professor Charles Todd said, ‘You’re talking about Ebou Manga.’ . . . Ebou Manga was small of build, with careful eyes, a reserved manner, and black as soot. He tentatively confirmed my sounds, clearly startled to have heard me uttering them. . . . In his dormitory room, I told him about my quest. We left for The Gambia at the end of the following week.”8 Ebou Manga did play a crucial role in facilitating Haley’s research in the Gambia, but Haley’s story compressed several months of planning into a fictionalized week of lucky coincidences.

In October 1966, Ebou Manga was a junior at Hamilton College and a member of the Utica chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). An economics professor at Utica College, who knew Manga through CORE, gave Manga’s name and phone number to Haley when the author spoke at the college regarding the Malcolm X book and Before This Anger. Haley called to invite Manga to dinner with him and Haley’s friend and research assistant George Sims. The three talked late into the night about the Gambia and Haley’s research.⁹ “I just cannot tell you how delighted I am over our last night’s meeting,” Manga wrote the next day. “You have embarked on a very worthy venture, and I shall do my best to give you my fullest assistance.” Haley described Manga as “a gentleman, quiet of manner, extremely capable, diligent, dependable, [and] loyal.”¹⁰ The young Gambian became Haley’s mental model for creating the character of Kunta Kinte: “Kunta to me became Ebou. Ebou to me became Kunta.”¹¹ More immediately, Manga opened doors for Haley in the Gambia. Manga, whose father, a pharmacist, worked for the Gambian government, told Haley how he hoped the project would benefit his home country. “Your book is going to be of tremendous importance to The Gambia,” Manga wrote. “As I told you last night, it will be the main vehicle that will bring The Gambia to the front-line of world attention. The benefit that The Gambia will derive from it is unlimited. I assure you that you will have a very enthusiastic reception whenever you go to The Gambia. Furthermore, you will never be short of the necessary assistance from both official and private sources while you are there.”12 Manga helped Haley make connections in the Gambia over the next several months before Haley’s first trip to Africa in the spring of 1967. As Manga predicted, Gambian officials saw Haley’s research as a potential boon to the small and newly independent African nation.

Interestingly, Haley traveled to Ireland to search for his Irish ancestry before he traveled to the Gambia. James Jackson, a second-generation Irish immigrant, owned Haley’s great-grandmother, Easter Jackson, and fathered a child with her, “Queen” Jackson Haley. “You know that my mission [to Ireland] was a facet of the research of the paternal side of my family’s history,” Haley wrote to Reader’s Digest editor Maurice Ragsdale after returning from Ireland. “Most Negroes’ U.S. lineage will include, somewhere during slavery, a white-sired child; it was thus that my father’s mother was the child of a white plantation owner. In the U.S. Archives in Washington I had found that this family—Jacksons—originated in Carrickmacross, Ireland; and now I was going there to learn whatever more details I could about the Jacksons—in order to take that side of the forebears back as far as I can take the maternal-side African.”¹³ Haley initially included these Irish ancestors and anecdotes in his lectures, but they eventually became a footnote as the Gambian part of his story grew in importance.

Haley stopped in London on his return trip from Ireland, where he visited the office of the high commissioner of Gambia and made preliminary visits to archives and libraries in the city. These research leads made him increasingly excited for his planned visit to the Gambia. “I am told there are still present at Gambia—or on James Island, hard by Gambia’s capital city of Bathurst—the ruins of that centuries-old slave fort,” Haley told Ragsdale in December 1966. “I am told that I very well may be able to obtain for a keepsake there, if I dig a bit, a link or two of the heavily rusted chain with which the slaves were chained.”14 In addition to the possibility of securing material artifacts to connect to his genealogy, Haley was optimistic that he would be able to find the specific slave ship that had carried his ancestor away from the Gambia some two hundred years earlier. “I am told that the township of Bathurst has ancient ‘village records,’ in Arabic, going back before 1766—supposedly recording chronological events of local interest,” Haley wrote. “Suppose I can there find the name of that ship! (It really isn’t impossible!) In fact, I may be able to find the name of it in London; the Admiralty Shipping records are so exhaustive and meticulous. I know the year. I know that not many ships went into Gambia, as into other ports. Either in London, or at Gambia, it’s just possible.”¹⁵ Haley’s optimism was partly aimed at convincing Reader’s Digest that their travel funds were being well spent and that the magazine’s condensation of Before This Anger would be successful. “I surely don’t intend to miss with this book,” Haley concluded. “It just seems to me to get more and more gripping the more I round out the research.”¹⁶

As he prepared for his trip to Africa, Haley sent letters to a dozen Gambian officials whose names Manga had given him. “I think you will be pleased to know that my project promises to bring great international attention to The Gambia,” Haley wrote. “Reader’s Digest already has contracted to condense my book into its 24 million issues in 13 languages about the world.” Haley also noted that filmmaker Elia Kazan had inquired about making Before This Anger into a film. “America’s greatest cinema director has announced plans to film from this book a major motion picture,” Haley promised. “A sizeable portion will be filmed in The Gambia, employing many Gambians as actors. I think it’s safe to predict that by 1969, The Gambia will enjoy world recognition—and tourism.”17 M.D. N’Jie, an official in the Gambian Information Office who had known Ebou Manga since childhood, wrote back to Haley with promises of support. “I assure you that you will receive the fullest co-operation possible in your mission. We are indeed proud to learn that someone of your eminence can trace his descent from The Gambia.”¹⁸

Haley made his first trip to the Gambia in late March 1967, the first time he had touched African soil. After a long flight from New York to Dakar, Senegal, Haley prepared to board a Nigerian Airlines connecting flight to Yundum Airport in Bathurst, Gambia. When the customs representative handed him a form, Haley recalls staring at the “name” section and thinking, “I really don’t know my real name, as you who never left Africa know yours. Then I wrote ‘Haley,’ thinking how virtually all of us U.S. blacks bore the names, actually, of whom ever [sic] had happened to own our slave forebears.”¹⁹ After reaching the Gambia, Haley connected with Ebou Manga, who had arrived in the country several days earlier. Manga told his contacts about Haley’s research and helped Haley secure time on Radio Gambia to describe his mission.²⁰ Haley stayed in the Gambia for a week, visiting local archives and talking with anyone who might offer insight into his family’s history. His visit was front-page news in the Gambia News Bulletin: “Mr. Alex Haley, one of the top magazine writers in the United States, and perhaps the best known Negro journalist in America, is here on a short working visit—and with the news that The Gambia will be one of the most talked about African countries once his next book ‘Before This Anger’ appears next Spring.” The goals of Haley’s trip were widely circulated in the country. The Gambia News Bulletin informed readers that Haley’s book “will tell the story of how an American Negro family rooted itself in the United States over a 200 year period from the time an African slave was taken from The Gambia to work in the plantations of South Carolina in 1766.”21 Haley talked with dozens of people about the details of his genealogical search, which helped his hosts in the Gambia find someone who could tell a story of the capture of Haley’s ancestor that would fit the dates Haley had already identified.

Back in the United States, Haley wrote to his agent Paul Reynolds with excitement about the developments in the Gambia. “I am about to produce the single biggest book success of 1968,” Haley wrote. “You watch! Can you imagine that in Africa, they were able to determine for me even the very village from which my 1760’s forbear was taken! And the history of that village can authentically be taken back to about 1600! Ain’t never been a book like this! We’re going to hang a Pulitzer Prize copy on that Reynolds’ office hallway wall!”²² Here again, the personal and professional meaning of Haley’s search converged. Curiosity fueled his travels to the Gambia, and he was sincerely enthusiastic about finding his furthest-back person. At the same time, Haley knew that he was putting together a remarkable story and that, if he could pull it off, he would reap critical and commercial success. By this point Reynolds had heard Haley promise several times that Before This Anger would be a major book. Reynolds wanted to hear fewer promises and to see more writing. “Your experience in Africa is magnificent,” Reynolds told Haley, before reminding him that he still had to write the book. “The time must come very soon when you’ll be doing the weary labor of sorting out your notes and organizing them, and start writing. When can you promise me the first 10000 words?”²³

Haley had been home for a month when he received a phone call from the Gambian High Commission in London. After Haley’s first visit several Gambian officials organized a “Haley Committee” to aid the author’s search for his ancestors. The official in London told Haley that they had found something “very worth your while” and encouraged him to return as soon as possible. “Knowing the Africans—that they never would make such a phone call, or statement, unless it really was something, without a second’s hesitation I said yes,” Haley wrote to Reynolds on a plane en route to the Gambia.24 Haley said he had been “devouring facts about Africa” since his first trip. On the Pam Am flight from New York to Dakar, he read E.W. Bovill’s The Golden Trade of the Moors (1958) and Sir John Milner Gray’s History of the Gambia (1940).²⁵ Haley’s first trip had generated significant interest in the small country, and dozens of people were now invested in making his family quest successful. “I thought about how it was good that I had made the first trip with Ebou Manga, meeting people,” Haley wrote. “Then, when I had left, they had begun to spread my mission. The African grapevine had gone to work, abetted by traveling inspectors, and some telephone calls.”²⁶

In notes typed shortly after the second trip to the Gambia, Haley described himself as an “apprentice Mandinka” and wrote in vivid terms about what the trip meant in his family saga. “It seemed incredible that I, from Henning, Tennessee, actually was here, having employed an African safari of a dozen people to take me to see what Grandma used to sit me down in the kitchen and give me cookies and jelly biscuits and tell me about,” Haley wrote. “Cousin Georgia had died the morning I was on the plane to Dakar; and her funeral services were being held the day I was there on the launch in the river, hunting what Grandma and she had told me about. . . . She had . . . via me . . . re-opened the long, dark corridors of those 200-odd years from our African forebears, in whom we had been semen.”27

Haley’s use of semen is a good indication that he thought of his genealogical search in paternal terms. Indeed, there are several notecards in his archived research materials across the top of which Haley wrote “semen.”²⁸ While Haley described his female elders as the most influential storytellers in his family, he always expressed the most interest in and identification with the men in his family’s history, especially “the Mandinka” (later Kunta Kinte) and “Chicken George.” By thinking of his story in terms of forefathers “in whom we had been semen,” Haley imagined his female ancestors (the characters Belle, Kizzy, and Tildy) as little more than receptacles who served as bridges from one generation of men to the next. Even when Haley used semen in more challenging ways, such as to describe how white slave owners had fathered “Chicken George” and “Queen” Haley, he evinced more interest in asserting paternity than in what this meant for the women involved, Kizzy and Easter Jackson. Haley underdeveloped the female characters in Roots because he approached his family history from the earliest stages as a search for semen.

It was on his second trip to the Gambia that Haley first heard the story of the most important man in his story, Kunta Kinte. After Haley’s first visit Gambian officials had searched throughout the country for someone who knew the Kinte family history. Some of these officials carried pictures of Haley and his American family members. A man named Demba Kinte, who resembled a picture of George “Chicken George” Lea, Haley’s great-great-grandfather, pointed officials to the village of Juffure, where his uncle, Kebba Fofana Kinte, could tell the family history going back several generations.²⁹ “I have to say that I am totally overwhelmed at the work that the Committee has done since I was here last, in the Gambia,” Haley told the officials at the start of his second visit. “I understand that there has been one rather epochal development that you have made in your own local research since I left—and that was concerning a story which was told by an elderly man, which seems incredibly to tie in with the information that I have had, all my life, from my own parents, or grandparents.” Incredible as it was, Haley was eager to believe that he could trace himself back to a specific Gambian ancestor. He promised to make sure that this amazing story would also benefit his hosts in the Gambia. “The only thing that I can say, in turn, is that . . . I shall make every effort to write a book which will recompense the efforts that you have made in behalf of The Gambia, as overwhelmingly,” Haley told the officials. “I believe that world attention focused upon this country will bring the community many benefits.”30

Figure 1. Alex Haley with children in the Gambia, 1967. Image courtesy of Dr. David P. Gamble.

Figure 2. Alex Haley takes notes on boat en route to Fort James in the Gambia, 1967. Gambian kora player Jali Nyama Suso is seated to Haley’s right. Image courtesy of Dr. David P. Gamble.

After Gambian officials told Haley about Kebba Fofana Kinte and described what this elder had said about the Kinte family history, they took Haley to meet him. Haley, George Sims, and ten Gambian officials, interpreters, and musicians took a boat up the Gambia River to the village of Juffure. As they approached the village, Haley saw for the first time Fort James, from which slave ships had once departed. “I began to experience almost hallucinatory visions,” Haley wrote. “It was as if I began to see, ahead, some of the things which had happened. . . . I could see the slave ships drawing out, heavily laden. I could imagine the confusion, the blood, on the decks. I could see the black forms wrestling loose and diving over the side. I could imagine the horror below the decks. I rapidly wrote in my notebooks.” Haley started to cry. “I could feel the Africans staring at me,” he wrote. “It was not the first time that tears were in my eyes in Africa.”31

In Roots, Haley described the safari to Juffure as the “peak experience” of his life, “that which emotionally, nothing in your life ever transcends.”32 A crowd of villagers greeted Haley and his traveling party. Among the villagers was Kebba Fofana Kinte, whom Haley described as “a small man wearing an off-white robe, a pillbox hat over an aquiline-featured black face,” who had “about him an aura of ‘somebodiness.’”³³ With dozens of villagers gathered around, Kebba Fofana Kinte began to tell Haley about the Kinte clan’s ancestral history. Haley considered Kebba Fofana Kinte a griot, a traditional storyteller and musician skilled at performing the oral history of the village. “The griot would speak, bending forward from the waist, his body rigid, his neck cords standing out, his words seeming almost physical objects,” Haley wrote. Kebba Fofana Kinte spoke in Mandinka and would speak one or two sentences and then lean back, while an interpreter translated his words into English for Haley. “Spilling from the griot’s head came an incredibly complex Kinte clan lineage that reached back across many generations,” Haley wrote, “who married whom; who had what children; what children then married whom; then their offspring. It was all just unbelievable.”³⁴

After speaking for almost two hours, Kebba Fofana Kinte reached the part of the story that Haley had traveled four thousand miles to hear. He told Haley that Omoro and Binta Kinte had four sons, Kunta, Lamin, Suwadu, and Madi, and that one day Kunta went out to find firewood and disappeared. “The family believed he was caught,” the interpreter told Haley. “Because then, you know the slave trade was going on.”³⁵ “I sat as if I were carved of stone,” Haley wrote in Roots. “My blood seemed to have congealed. This man whose lifetime had been in this back-country African village had no way in the world to know that he had just echoed what I had heard all through my boyhood years on my grandma’s front porch in Henning, Tennessee . . . of an African who always had insisted that his name was ‘Kin-tay’; who had called a guitar a ‘ko,’ and a river within the state of Virginia, ‘Kamby Bolongo’; and who had been kidnapped into slavery while not far from his village, chopping wood, to make himself a drum.”36

Figure 3. Alex Haley listens to Kebba Fofana Kinte, seated with white hat, tell the story of the Kinte family. George Sims, Haley’s friend and research assistant, is seated to Haley’s right. Image courtesy of Dr. David P. Gamble.

Figure 4. Kebba Fofana Kinte, the Gambian elder who told Haley the story of Kunta Kinte. Image courtesy of Dr. David P. Gamble

After Roots was published in 1976 and broadcast the following year to international acclaim, British journalist Mark Ottaway and others raised questions about the reliability of the Kinte family history Haley had heard in the Gambia and about whether Kebba Fofana Kinte was actually a griot.³⁷ Gambian scholar Bakari Sidibe cautioned Haley as early as 1973 about relying too heavily on Kebba Fofana Kinte. Sidibe, for example, wrote Haley with more information on Kebba Fofana Kinte and his relationship to the griot tradition. “Family griots, as part of their hereditary profession, must learn the stories of their patron family,” Sidibe told Haley. “For this reason, the ambitious ones go for detail, chronology, praises, and drama. It is impossible to represent a griot’s performance in writing, which loses much of his style, voice quality, and general showmanship, for they are entertainers.”³⁸ Although Kebba Fofana Kinte adopted this style and was a respected elder in Juffure, Sidibe said that he was not of the specific class of family griots but was instead a drummer and substitute imam. “By birth and by his own views he is not a griot,” Sidibe wrote. Sidibe had sought out an elder from a different branch of the Kinte family and had noted “some glaring contradictions” between the different family histories. To figure out the “contradictions in names, places, and generations,” Sidibe encouraged Haley to interview “members of the five Kinte branches in Gambia . . . including at least one griot from each house” and to put these oral sources together with the available written documents in Gambia.39

While Kebba Fofana Kinte may not have been a griot, he was clearly a skilled storyteller. The “griot embodies entertainment,” Haley later noted. “He was the story-teller, carrier of news. He was the television of his time.”⁴⁰ For Haley, listening to Kebba Fofana Kinte tell the story of the Kinte clan must have been like looking in a mirror. After pitching Before This Anger for several years, Haley understood that people enjoyed stories that were almost unbelievable, that suspending disbelief was part of the pleasure of the story he was selling. The appeal of Haley’s story was that it was supposed to be impossible for an African American to trace his or her history back, through the abyss of slavery, to a specific African ancestor. Haley traded on this impossibility in developing Roots. In the Gambia, Kebba Fofana Kinte told a compelling and persuasive story that, incredible as it was, Haley was eager to believe. “I attached myself like a mollusk to the mystery,” Haley said.⁴¹ Over the next decade, Haley found that agents, publishers, lecture audiences, film producers, readers, and television viewers were also eager to be moved by this remarkable story.