Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-c47g7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-23T09:29:59.031Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Effect of Alex Haley's Roots on How Gambians Remember the Atlantic Slave Trade1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 May 2014

Donald R. Wright
Donald R. Wright*
Affiliation:
SUNY-Cortland, Emeritus
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Beginning in late August 1974, I spent eight months in The Gambia, collecting oral traditions. My intention was to use what I obtained to reconstruct the history of Niumi, a precolonial “state” (Mandinka: banko) located at the mouth of the Gambia River. Over three centuries of slave trading in the river, Niumi was a dominant player in the region's political economy. Thus, one of my primary goals was to learn how Gambians remembered the centuries-long commerce that connected people living along the Gambia River to a vast Atlantic economic system, the heart of which was the sale and transportation of humans.

To my disappointment, with only a few exceptions, Gambian informants did not recall much about the slave trade. In Albreda and Juffure, the two Gambia-River villages where people were most involved in dealings with Europeans during the slave-trading era, the best informants could say little beyond noting ruins of old buildings and mentioning vague doings of “the Portuguese.” In the end, only three informants were able and willing to say anything beyond the most banal generalities about the capture, movement, and sale of slaves that occurred in the Gambia River. My assessment was that in the body of stories that Gambians held in their collective memory, a vast void existed between tales of the long-ago, and likely mythical, origins of a clan, village, or state and events that occurred much more recently, in this case after the British settled Bathurst, near the river's mouth, in 1816.

Type
Literacy, Feedback, and the Imagination of History
Information
History in Africa , Volume 38 , 2011 , pp. 295 - 318
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

1

I am grateful to Lisa DeLuca, a student in Rutgers University's Master of Library and Information Science program, for introducing me to new search technologies and helping me find works used in this article, and to Peace Corps veteran Chris Honeycutt (Kawsa Dampha in The Gambia) for speaking to me on several occasions about matters relating to tourism and the preservation of historical sites on James Island and in Juffure.

References

Blassingame, John, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (New York, 1972).Google Scholar
Buckley, Stephen, “From ‘Roots’ to Riches?” Washington Post (19 May 1995), A27.Google Scholar
Buckley, Stephen “African Village Says It Did Not Profit from Alex Haley's ‘Roots,’” Jet (10 April 1995), 26.Google Scholar
Crouch, Stanley, “The Roots of Alex Haley's Fraud,” Daily News [New York], (12 April 1998) (http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/opinions/1998/04/12/1998-04-12_the_roots_of_alex_haley_s_fr.html, accessed February 2011)Google Scholar
Crouch, Stanley, “The ‘Roots’ of Huckster Haley's Great Fraud,” Jewish World Review 5 (18 January 2002), 57–62.Google Scholar
Current, Richard N., Arguing with Historians: Essays on the Historical and the Unhistorical (Middletown CT, 1987).Google Scholar
Curtin, Philip D., The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison, 1969).Google Scholar
Fisher, Murray, “In Memorial: Alex Haley,” Playboy 39 (1 July 1992), 161.Google Scholar
Franklin, John H., From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans (New York, 1974).Google Scholar
Gijanto, Liza, “Stabilization and Tourism at the Gambia River's Atlantic Trade Sites: the James Island Conservation and Survey Project,” Newsletter of the African Diaspora Archaeology Network, September 2009, www.diaspora.uiuc.edu/news0909/news0909-3.pdf (accessed October 2010).Google Scholar
Gite, Lloyd, “Festival Time in Gambia: 20 Years after ‘Roots,’ a Country Invites African Americans Home,” Black Enterprise 27 (June 1997), 335.Google Scholar
Gray, John M., A History of the Gambia (Cambridge, 1939).Google Scholar
Gray, Richard, “Eclipse Maps,” Journal of African History 6 (1965): 251–62.Google Scholar
Gray, Richard, “Annual Eclipse Maps,” Journal of African History 9 (1968): 147–57.Google Scholar
Haley, Alex. The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York, 1965).Google Scholar
Haley, Alex, “My Search for Roots,” Tuesday Magazine (October 1965), 4–7.Google Scholar
Haley, Alex, Roots (Garden City NY, 1976).Google Scholar
Henige, David P., The Chronology of Oral Tradition (Oxford, 1974).Google Scholar
Henige, David P., “Oral Tradition as a Means of Reconstructing the Past,” in: Philips, John E. (ed.) Writing African History (Rochester NY, 2005), 169–90.Google Scholar
Kanoute, Dembo, Histoire de l'Afrique Authentique (translated by Sanogho, Tidiane, and Diallo, Ibrahima (Dakar, 1972).Google Scholar
Mark, Peter, “Portuguese” Style and Luso-African Identity: Precolonial Senegambia, Sixteenth-Nineteenth Centuries (Bloomington IN, 2002).Google Scholar
Mills, Gary B., and Mills, Elizabeth Shown, ‘Roots and the New ‘Faction’: A Legitimate Tool for Clio?” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 89 (1981), 3–26.Google Scholar
Moore, David C., “Routes: Alex Haley's Roots and the Rhetoric of Genealogy,” Transition 64 (1994), 4–21.Google Scholar
Moore, David C., “Revisiting a Silenced Giant: Alex Haley's Roots – Bibliographic Essay, and Research Report on the Haley Archives at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville,” Resources for American Literary Study 22 (1996), 200–42.Google Scholar
Niane, Djibril T., Soundiata ou l'Épopée Mandingue (Paris, 1960).Google Scholar
Nobile, Philip, “Uncovering Roots,” The Village Voice, 23 February 1993, 31–38.Google Scholar
Rose, Willie L., Race and Region in American Historical Fiction: Four Episodes in Popular Culture (Oxford, 1979).Google Scholar
Shenker, Israel, “Some Historians Dismiss Charge of Factual Mistakes in ‘Roots,’” New York Times (10 April 1977), 29.Google Scholar
Taylor, Helen, “‘The Griot from Tennessee’: The Saga of Alex Haley's Roots,” Critical Quarterly 37 (1995), 46–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thomas, Hugh, The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade: 1440-1870 (New York, 1997).Google Scholar
Vansina, Jan, Oral Tradition: A Study in Historical Methodology (London, 1965).Google Scholar
Wilks, Ivor, “Aspects of Bureaucratisation in Ashanti in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of African History 7 (1966), 215–33.Google Scholar
Wood, Peter H., Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion (New York, 1974).Google Scholar
Wright, Donald R., “Darbo Jula: The Role of a Mandinka Jula Clan in the Long-Distance Trade of the Gambia River and Its Hinterland,” African Economic History 6 (1977), 33–45.Google Scholar
Wright, Donald R., The Early History of Niumi: Settlement and Foundation of a Mandinka State on the Gambia River (Athens OH, 1977).Google Scholar
Wright, Donald R., Oral Traditions from The Gambia, Volume I: Mandinka Griots (Athens OH, 1979).Google Scholar
Wright, Donald R., Oral Traditions from The Gambia, Volume II: Family Elders (Athens OH, 1980).Google Scholar
Wright, Donald R., The World and a Very Small Place in Africa: A History of Globalization in Niumi, The Gambia (Armonk NY, 2010 [1997]).Google Scholar
Wright, Donald R., “Beating Up the Bumsters: Conflict Between Government and Informal Tourist Workers in The Gambia,” paper presented at the Sixth International Conference on Mande Studies, Conakry and Kankan, 20-27 June 2005.Google Scholar