‘Roots’, the supposedly true story of a slaves' oddessy portrayed in the novel and TV series has now been exposed as a fake. But the hero, Kunta Kinteh, was apparently real enough at one time, and you can still visit his oldest living relative, Binta Kinteh, in the tiny village of Jufureh on the north bank of the River Gambia.
She was a tiny woman who spoke little. She showed me a picture of the actor who’d player her ancestor in the TV series and then held out a begging bowl. Leaving her compound I walked down to the river and sat with a local guide. He told of the terrible price that the people of the region had paid in the past so that Europeans could live an easy, prosperous life.
‘I’m sorry to say this,’ I said to him, ‘but perhaps you haven’t got all the facts. It wasn’t just Europeans who got rich, and it wasn’t just something that happened years ago either.’
Today the slave trade continues in Gambia in various formats. Gambians work for their African bosses for less than 50p a day. Women labourers attached to the fishing fleets get paid in fish. And there are still real slaves, people whose lives are not their own, who work for nothing.
Near to Brufut a lad led me to a sacred Baobab. The Baobab is an unusual tree insomuch as like humans it grows smaller as it gets older. Africans revere it. A mud prayer hut nestled under the mighty branches on a hill above the sea. The lad pointed at a stone and said that you paid for prayers there, in money, cloth, radios, or SLAVES. I thought he was pulling my leg. Slaves? In 2003? Later the tourist office confirmed that the tradition of exchanging slaves for prayers at various holy places was indeed still alive and well in 2003.
If you’re a white European you’ll get the ‘You Bad Colonial Slaver’ accusation constantly thrown at you in Africa, especially around election time when the various governments are looking for something to blame for their own inadequacies. There’s no reason why you should take it lying down. History tells us quite clearly that the slave trade DID NOT start with the coming of the white man. The problem is, local people and European liberals often either don’t have access, or don’t want access, to the true facts. So if you can, tell those willing to listen, as I did the guide at Jufureh, about Polybus, an early Greek traveller, who noted that Africans sold other Africans into slavery to the merchants of the Sahara as early as 146 BC. Tell them that when Europeans arrived on the scene in the 1500’s local chiefs were said to be overjoyed because it meant that they finally had a ready market when they wanted to sell off entire weaker tribes, as well as their own unwanted citizens (written records show that the British human rights activists of the early nineteenth century expressed great concern when our government eventually banned slavery. They worried that if African chiefs had no easy way to get rid of the criminals and the mentally and physically ill of their own societies, as well as those they captured during inter-tribal scuffles, then they would simply execute these people, who were a burden on their foodstocks). And finally, tell them that slavery was so engrained in black African culture that when Britain abolished the practice in 1807 the local chiefs, instead of being relieved, merely took their trade in humans elsewhere, and continued to do business with the Arabs and the French until 1895.
I wouldn’t for a second say that Europeans were innocent in a slave trade that kidnapped over ten million people from the West African coast. But it would be nice to see the victims' ancestors in present day Africa shoulder their share of the blame at long last.