Gambia’s race to save its ‘Roots’ on Kunta Kinteh Island
As the rebel slave who defied his captors, Kunta Kinte, immortalized in print and on screen in “Roots”, put The Gambia on the map for historical tourism. But the island where he and tens of thousands of West African slaves faced the horrors of being chained, branded and separated before leaving their homeland forever, is under threat from sea erosion and neglect.
Kinte’s descendants, along with heritage officials, warn that without urgent action, 550 years of history could be lost. They are pressuring the new government to preserve the country’s historical memory for the next generation of Gambians and tourists. The island’s namesake sprang to fame as the central character in American author Alex Haley’s “Roots: The Saga of an American Family”. The late Haley claimed to be a descendant of Kinte but doubts have been cast over the authenticity of this claim.
Although “Roots” has been criticized for historical inaccuracies, it indisputably heightened awareness of the horrors of the slave trade when published in 1976. The UN’s cultural agency awarded the island World Heritage status as a memorial to an “important, although painful, period of human history”, spanning the arrival of Portuguese traders in the mid-15th century through to its use as a holding cell for illegal slavers after Britain’s abolition of the trade in 1807. The parched-looking trees and brick ruins that occupy the island once housed dozens of captured west Africans awaiting passage to the New World, but whole sections of the slaves’ quarters have already been reclaimed by the river’s salty waves and high winds. Decades of neglect
For Hassoum Ceesay, a historian and official at The Gambia’s National Centre for Arts and Culture, it is time to seize the chance to reverse what he describes as two decades of neglect under former leader Yahya Jammeh, or risk losing the island. “We are very hopeful that with this new government there will be more attention paid,” he told AFP in a book-lined room at his home near the capital, Banjul, referring to President Adama Barrow, who took office in February. “There was a lot of pressure, particularly from the former president, to sort of sift the history of the island,” he said. “We resisted, and that resistance made the government reduce its attention and support.”
He said that Jammeh even added mandatory days in his home village, Kanilai, to a tour aimed at diaspora tourists as part of a “Roots” festival, even though it is unrelated to the site. Tourism numbers were badly hit by the protracted political crisis caused by Jammeh’s refusal to quit after 22 years at the helm when he lost an election in December, another concern for heritage experts.