Back to the Land of Roots. African American Tourism and the Cultural Heritage of the River Gambia

Abstract

In the late 1960s, the African American journalist and novelist Alex Haley Identified the small rural village of Juffureh at the mouth of the River Gambia as the place where slave traders kidnapped his ancestor Kunta Kinte so as to sell him as a slave on the other side of the Atlantic. Within a few years, the publication of the novel, Roots, in 1976 and the production of a TV series with the same title brought the small Republic of The Gambia to the attention of the international community and inaugurated a tradition of encounters between Gambians and African American tour­ists. This article addresses the public memorialization of the Atlantic slave trade and the use of such heritage as a tourist resource in contemporary The Gambia by illustrating two initiatives of the late 1990s both aimed at marketing the land of Roots to a global audience of African American tourists. The first was the establishment of a slavery museum in the locality of Albreda, near Juffureh. The second was an initiation ceremony that a small Jola community in the proximity of the capital city of Banjul organised for a group of African American College students in 2000.