Origins
of The Roots Story: Kunta Kinte
(aka Kunta Kante / Kunte) is the principle
Mandinka
character from the book titled
Roots: The Saga of An American
Family
(Doubleday: 1976) written
by the Pulitzer Prize winning
author
Alex Haley. It is roughly
based on his family's oral history
starting with the capture of his
slave
ancestor, Kunta Kinte, in
the village of Juffureh (Juffure), The
Gambia,
in the 1767.
It was
the recited family stories he was told as a youth in the 1920s
and 1930s that inspired him to
take more interest into his
ancestry. His genealogical
interest took on more decisive
action 1964 while in discussion
with his publishers,
Doubleday,
about a book deal chronicling his
clans
history. His publishers were so
impressed about the uniqueness of
his proposal that they agreed to
advance him money to further his
research.
The Story
Unfolds: After extensive
interviews with members of his
close relatives, including his grandmother,
Cynthia Palmer,
as well as his interviews with
people in expert libraries he
concluded that his descendant,
Kunta Kinte, was
kidnapped by slavers in
Juffure
which is in the tiny
country of The Gambia, West
Africa, way back in
the 1760s.
It was on a
visit to the
British Museum in
mid 1960s that the author came to a
eureka moment. While looking at
the
Rosetta Stone he deduced that
if the hieroglyphic language of
the ancient Egyptians could be
decrypted then maybe there was a
language that could assist him to
decipher the foreign phrases and
names that
he had heard as a child growing up
in Henning, Tennessee from his grandmother
and sisters in the 1920s and 1930s.
Alex Haley arrived in Juffureh in
1967 hoping to learn more about
the Kinte clan and his famous
descendant. He was directed to the
griot Kebba Kanji Fofana
who was supposed to possess a deep
oral history of the Kinte family
lineage going back generations.
Fofana recited the family's
lineage which
seemed to match Haley's own family's
stories and he emerged from his
trip to Juffureh greatly moved. So
began his work which lasted over a
decade
on the Roots saga.
The
title of the book was going to be
called Before This Anger
however, it was later changed to
Roots and was first published in
an abbreviated style by the Reader's Digest in 1974. The
finished manuscript went on sale in
bookshops in 1976.
1977 TV Film: In 1977 the
book was adapted into a television
mini-series and was shown by the
ABC TV network on the 23 January
1977 and received 130 million
viewers over 8 nights. At the time
it was the highest rated TV
mini-series according
to the Nielsen Ratings. At the
time ABC were reluctant to show it
as they thought it could be a flop
so they decided to show it in the
unusual format of 8 consecutive
nights so it would be off-air as
soon as possible.
The film
initially starred
LeVar Burton as Kunta Kinte (slave name: Toby) who was later
played by John Amos. Other actors included Louis Gossett Jr. as Fiddler and Maya
Angelou as Nyo Boto. The series had a large impact on race
relations in America and gave
African Americans a sense of pride
and belonging and to look at
Africa not with shame but in a more
positive light.
Alex Haley
went on to win the
Pulitzer Prize
in 1977 as well as many honorary
degrees. Two years later in
February 1979 came the mini-series Roots: The Next Generation.
Controversy: After
the publication of his work and release of the min-series
controversy surrounded
the authenticity of Roots and the true location of Juffureh. Accusations of
plagiarism, factual inaccuracies and fictionalised historical
accounts abounded.
Slavery Fact: Whatever the
truth of the book's accounts the fact remains that millions of
West Africans were taken against their will as slaves and
shipped to the Americas.
The film made the horrors of
the slave trade better known to millions of Americans who
were never taught about this horrific aspect of their country's
involvement in the chronicling of the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade. Though the
majority of slaves were sold through African middlemen and not
captured in raiding parties, such as in the
Juffure example, the book is representative of the
ordeal many Africans had to go through in the Middle Passage and
furthermore highlights the humiliation and dehumanising
injustices many had to endure.
List: Useful Websites: • Alex Haley
Background into the Kunta Kinte research.
Lauren R., and Hemant Shah. "Race and the Transformation
of Culture: The Making of the Television Miniseries Roots."
Critical Studies in Mass Communication (Annandale, Virginia),
December 1992.
"Why Roots Hit Home." Time (New York) 14 February 1977.
Woll, David. Ethnic and Racial Images in American Film and
Television. New York: Garland, 1987.
Origins
of The Roots Story:
LeVar Burton
