Juffureh Village is situated on the North Bank Division of the Gambia. She is adjacent to the Fort James Island on the Mainland. The Taal Family founded the village before the Portuguese first discovered the former “Sandomingo” island in 1455. It is also said to believe that the kintes were found to be the second Settlers of the hamlet followed by Darbos, Danso, Njays and Jammeh.

Juffrureh is one of the oldest villages in Upper Niumi District and the history of Kunte Kinte, which made the villages popular, existed well before Alex Haley’s Roots chronicled in 1976. The people of the village had suffered much enmity in the hands of Portuguese, French Spanish and English during the time of Slavery. She was also believed to be trans-shipping centre for slaves to Europe, West Indies, America and elsewhere, in the world.

This short treatise-history has been traced as a matter of facts and compiled by one of the grandsons of Binta Kinte the seventh generations of kunte kinte, who was also a tour guide and tour representative for Gamtours from 1991 to 1976. The objective of compiling this information into pamphlets is to promote tourism and sustain our history and the Gambia as a whole.

Binta Kinte is not the last generations of Kunta Kinte in Juffureh. I believe that it is not wise to say the old woman is the last descendant of the Kinte family in Juffureh which means when she pass away “ROOTS” tours to the village may easily disappear.

Kintes sons and daughters, grand children and great grand children are living in Juffureh.


Binta Kinte


Written and compiled by Omar
Taal Grandson of Binta Kinte
Juffureh, The Gambia with permission for Every Generation

ALEX HALEY first came up with the idea for an article about the history of his maternal grandmother’s family while he was still working as a mess boy on the USS Murzin. Throughout his childhood he had spent his summers in Henning with his Grandma Cynthia, and the old woman never ceased to bend his ear with the tales of her ancestors Chicken George, Miss Kizzy, and the African known only as Kintay every chance she got. But as Alex grow old; Cynthia Palmer’s colourful stories began to sound less interesting and less believable, than they had to the more impressionable ears of a little boy.

Sensing this, the aging matriarch had one day taken her teenage grandson aside and told him to pay close attention to what she had to say. Years later, Haley still remembered the day vividly. He had been sitting by the kitchen window, admiring the tray full of biscuits that she was preparing to bake, when she suddenly called out to him, “Boy, sit down. You need to know where you come from”

This time, she talked on and on for hours, stressing with each tale she told and each character she described that these were not just colourful stories meant to entertain. The stories that she and her sisters were always telling represented, she insisted, the history of their people and the collective memory of their family and their race Alex’s family and Alex’s race. If that memory was not to be lost once, and for all, then she would have to remember all that he had been told and to tell to his children and his children’s children, just as she had done. It was the first time Haley had felt within him a sense of his place in his family and in the world, and the feeling that the two might somehow be related.

I’ve been told our history over and over again through the years, Haley explained proudly to an interview almost 30 years later concerning the origins of his own early interest in writing. Story telling was our family’s television. We’ve been lucky enough to have a storyteller in each generation I guess it’s me now.

A few years after his awakening at his grandmother’s side, during the lonely nights at sea, Haley began to turn his grandmother’s stories over and over in his head. Why not, he wondered to himself, preserve those stories once and for all in written form. And wouldn’t the saga of an American family raising itself over two centuries from slavery to affluence and respectability be of interest to more people than just his immediate family.

And besides, he rationalized to himself, Cynthia Palmer’s memories of the African named Kintay who lived near a river known as the Kamby Bolongo, called a Ko, and had wandered into the forest to chop wood for a drum he planned to make when he was captured into slavery as a child were far too distant to be reliable. It was not that he did not trust his Grandmother, he later explained.

But Alex Haley was, after all a writer by profession and by temperament. And, like most writers, he believed strongly almost religiously, in the authority of the written word. Two hundred years and seven generations were too long for a story that had never actually been written down to retain any degree of accuracy. Certainly, he conceded, the tales that his grandmother and her sisters told were based on people who really lived and things that really happened. But the names, the words, and the details had, he believed with equal certainty, been far too distorted by time and the imperfections of memory for anyone ever to match them with the records of the family’s remote African past if such records existed at all.

During Haley’s early years working as a writer in New York City, his idea for developing the story of his own family kept getting pushed aside by other, less ambitious projects. In many ways, it was the experience of writing the book with Malcolm X that convinced Haley that the time had finally come for him to begin the project in earnest. For years, Haley had worked to established himself in the predominately white literary world, doing everything in his power to minimize the role that race played in the way his work was received. Haley wanted to be respected as a writer and as a man, not simply as a black writer and a black man.

From the beginning of his relationship with Malcolm X, however, Haley was fascinated by the Black Muslim minister’s, keen awareness of the powerful role that race played throughout society and in the life of his people. For Malcolm X, as it had been for Cynthia Palmer, being black was not an obstacle to be overcome but a source of identity and pride. If Haley was ever to know who he was and where he was going, he had to find a way to discover and to embrace his own past. That was what he had demanded of his friend Malcolm X throughout the long, often painful series of interviews that became the text The Autobiography of Malcolm. And now he was about to demand the same thing of himself.

Haley originally intended to call the book that he was planning to write Before This Anger. As he told an interviewer in February 1966 shortly after the publication of the The Autobiography of Malcolm X, the book was to be a biography of my family, a chronicle of how an American Negro family rooted itself in this country over a 200-year period.

All that changed later in the year, when Haley was sent by one of his editors to research a story in England. While staying in London, he decided to visit the British Museum, where the Rosetta Stone, which had yielded the first clue to the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics, was on display. Something about the great black slab of engraved stone and its history captivated him, and sent his mind reeling back to his grandmother’s stories and the strange, indecipherable of words she often used to tell him. It was all he could do, in fact, to keep his attention focused on this remarkable story that the museum’s tour guide was patiently relating to the crowd.

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