Word: gambia
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...believe it? We took the Feb. 14 issue of TIME dealing with Roots across the Gambia River into Juffure. The village griot, or storyteller, has died, but the family picture was enjoyed by all: Binta Kinte, Karafa Kinte, Fatou Kinte, Kebba Madi Kinte, Demba Kinte, Yusupha Kinte, Yaya Kinte...
Starting with fragmentary accounts of an African slave ancestor and a few African words which had been passed down to him through generations of family storytelling, Haley traced his lineage to a village in Gambia...
Haley's genealogical search took him back to West Africa. In Gambia he encountered an aged griot-a, tribal oral historian-who traced Haley's lineage back centuries before Kunta Kinte was snatched by slavers in 1767. The emotional impact of hearing his forebears named cannot be overestimated. Roots' opening section, a fictionalization of Kunta's birth, Moslem upbringing and manhood rites, have a vividness of detail that only the impassioned imagination can provide. Consider this for example...
...book, The Autobiography of Malcom X, Haley began a 12-year quest which included over half a million miles of travel across three continents to find the name of his first known African ancestor, "Kunte Kinte," and the exact location of his family village, Juffure, in West Africa, now Gambia; that ancestor had been kidnapped in 1767, shipped to Maryland, and sold to a Virginian planter. The first black American to trace his lineage back to Africa, Haley has compiled an authentic and detailed picture of African life in his historical novel Roots. Haley retraces the oral history passed down...
Nearly half a billion people are suffering from some form of hunger; 10,000 of them die of starvation each week in Africa, Asia and Latin America. There are all too familiar severe shortages of food in the sub-Saharan Sahelian countries of Chad, Gambia, Mali, Mauritania, Senegal, Upper Volta and Niger; also in Ethiopia, northeastern Brazil, India and Bangladesh. India alone needs 8 to 10 million tons of food this year from outside sources, or else as many as 30 million people might starve...