Roots_ The Saga of an American Family - Alex Haley [375]
Arriving in Dakar, Senegal, the next morning, we caught a light plane to small Yundum Airport in The Gambia. In a passenger van, we rode into the capital city of Banjul (then Bathurst). Ebou and his father, Alhaji Manga—Gambians are mostly Moslem—assembled a small group of men knowledgeable in their small country’s history, who met with me in the lounge of the Atlantic Hotel. As I had told Dr. Vansina in Wisconsin, I told these men the family narrative that had come down across the generations. I told them in a reverse progression, backward from Grandma through Tom, Chicken George, then Kizzy saying how her African father insisted to other slaves that his name was “Kin-tay,” and repetitively told her phonetic sounds identifying various things, along with stories such as that he had been attacked and seized while not far from his village, chopping wood.
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