Kunta Kinte was born in 1750 in Juffure, in the lower reaches of the mighty River Gambia. Juffure lies a few metres from the banks of this great River Gambia which is 1,100 km long and passes through Guinea, Senegal and Gambia.



Kunta Kinte was one of four children of Omar Kinte and Binta Fofana. Kunta's strict  Islmaic upbringing, the rigors of the manhood training he undergoes, and the proud origins of the Kinte name.
In 1765 Kunta is taken into manhood training. One day that year, he is sent to hunt a bird without a weapon. While hunting the bird he spots slave hunters, runs back to his village and tells the inhabitants what he has seen.

One day in 1767, while Kunta is searching for wood to make a drum, four men chase him, surround him and take him captive. Kunta awakens to find himself blindfolded, gagged, bound, and a prisoner of white men. He and others are put on the slave ship the Lord Ligonier for a three-month voyage to North America where he was sold as a slave. Kunta soon began to suffer the indignities that awaited new slaves from Africa: whipping, over work, hunger, rape and branding of hot iron on his body by his master.

The name of his master or owner was Mr. Waller, who changed his name to Toby, but Kunta refused the new name and for this he was tortured and beaten and his foot was cut as punishment.
Kunta survives the trip to Maryland and is sold to a plantation owner, Master Waller, who renames him "Toby". He rejects the name imposed by his owners and refuses to speak to others.

Thanks for patience and perseverance, Kunta lived in the plantation, got married and had children and grand children. He died in 1822 in Virginia. Alex Haley’s book ‘Roots’ helped to immortalize Kunta Kinte’s story.
His descendants still live in Juffure, where memory is is kept alive regularly with the Roots Festival and a museum. In 2009, James Island, where he and thousands of other slaves were removed to Americas, was renamed Kunta Kinte island in his memory.

The Trans Atlantic Slave Trade in The Gambia

We cannot narrate the story of Kunta Kinte without mentioning something about the slave trade in The Gambia. Almost 1 million people were removed from the Gambia area as slaves during the 1500 to 1830s. Gambia had the longest continuous exposure to the Atlantic slave trade of any region in Africa, with the earliest deportees leaving in the first decade of the sixteenth century and the last in the 1840s. In relative and absolute terms, too, its contribution varied through time. During a period, over 2000slaves were being seized from the Gambia region per year.

Today, numerous remains and ruins such as Kunta Kinte island formerly called James island, Fort Bullen, Juffure remain to make all freedom loving peoples remember Kunta Kinte and his sad fate as a slave.