In Juffureh, Gambia, in the summer of 2006, a Gambian man followed a group of European and American tourists back to the boat that had brought them to his village after a three-hour trip from the capital of Banjul. He held up two small, wooden, hand-carved statues, and when he caught up to the tourists, he called out a price of 300 dalasi (about twelve American dollars) for the pair. As he and the tourists drew closer to the dock where the boat waited, he lowered his asking price. By the time they reached the dock he reduced it again, and when he saw that the tourists where still not interested, he lowered the amount once more to a third of his original price. Seeing that the visitors were more concerned about eating their noontime meal on the boat than buying the statues that he had to sell, the man appealed to the disinterested group one last time. ‘It's Kunta Kinte!’ he yelled, hoping that the tourists would understand the value of his handiwork by naming the famous enslaved ancestor of Alex Haley, American author of a book that traced his roots back to Africa. Holding a statue high in each of his hands, the Gambian seller shouted to the unfazed crowd, ‘How much for Kunta Kinte?!’

There is no intrinsic reason for a foreign tourist to visit the village of Juffureh on the River Gambia other than its link to Haley's best-selling book, Roots: The Saga of an American Family. When Haley published Roots in 1976, he detailed how his family tree traced back over two centuries to a 17-year-old African ancestor named Kunta Kinte that slave traders had captured near that same village. The following year, the television mini-series captivated American audiences for eight nights in an unprecedented way.