Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [374]
Increasingly frustrated, I had a long talk with George Sims, with whom I’d grown up in Henning, and who is a master researcher. After a few days, George brought me a list of about a dozen people academically renowned for their knowledge of African linguistics. One whose background intrigued me quickly was a Belgian Dr. Jan Vansina. After study at the University of London’s School of African and Oriental Studies, he had done his early work living in African villages and written a book called La Tradition Orale. I telephoned Dr. Vansina where he now taught at the University of Wisconsin, and he gave me an appointment to see him. It was a Wednesday morning that I flew to Madison, Wisconsin, motivated by my intense curiosity about some strange phonetic sounds . . . and with no dream in this world of what was about to start happening....
That evening in the Vansinas’ living room, I told him every syllable I could remember of the family narrative heard since little boyhood—recently buttressed by Cousin Georgia in Kansas City. Dr. Vansina, after listening intently throughout, then began asking me questions. Being an oral historian, he was particularly interested in the physical transmission of the narrative down across generations.
We talked so late that he invited me to spend the night, and the next morning Dr. Vansina, with a very serious expression on his face, said, “I wanted to sleep on it. The ramifications of phonetic sounds preserved down across your family’s generations can be immense.” He said that he had been on the phone with a colleague Africanist, Dr. Philip Curtin; they both felt certain that the sounds I’d conveyed to him were from the “Mandinka” tongue. I’d never heard that word; he told me that it was the language spoken by the Mandingo people. Then he guess translated certain of the sounds. One of them probably meant cow or cattle, another probably meant the baobab tree, generic in West Africa. The word ko, he said, could refer to the kora, one of the Mandingo people’s oldest stringed instruments, made of a halved large dried gourd covered with goatskin, with a long neck, and twenty-one strings with a bridge. An enslaved Mandingo might relate the kora visually to some among the types of stringed instruments that U.S. slaves had.
The most involved sound I had heard and brought was Kamby Bolongo, my ancestor’s sound to his daughter Kizzy as he had pointed to the Mattaponi River in Spotsylvania County, Virginia. Dr. Vansina said that without question, bolongo meant, in the Mandinka tongue, a moving water, as a river, preceded by “Kamby,” it could indicate the Gambia River.
I’d never heard of it.
An incident happened that would build my feeling—especially as more uncanny things occurred—that, yes, they were up there watchin’ ...
I was asked to speak at a seminar held at Utica College, Utica, New York. Walking down a hallway with the professor who had invited me, I said I’d just flown in from Washington and why I’d been there. “The Gambia? If I’m not mistaken, someone mentioned recently that an outstanding student from that country is over at Hamilton.”
The old, distinguished Hamilton College was maybe a half hour’s drive away, in Clinton, New York. Before I could finish asking, a Professor Charles Todd said, “You’re talking about Ebou Manga.” Consulting a course roster, he told me where I could find him in an agricultural economics class. 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. Was Mandinka his home tongue? “No, although I am familiar with it.” He was a Wolof, he said. In his dormitory room, I told him about my quest. We left for The Gambia