Kunta Kinte

Kunta Kinte
LeVar Burton portraying Kunta Kinte in the TV miniseries Roots
Born	c. 1750 Juffure, The Gambia, West Africa
Died	c. 1822 Spotsylvania County, Virginia
Nationality	Mandinka
Occupation	slave
Known for	Roots: The Saga of an American Family Roots (TV miniseries)
Religion	Islam

Kunta Kinte (also known as Toby Waller) is the central character of the novel Roots: The Saga of an American Family by American author Alex Haley, and of the television miniseries Roots,^[1] based on the book. Haley described his book as faction - a mixture of fact and fiction.^[2] After Haley's book became nationally famous, American author Harold Courlander noted that the section describing Kinte's life was apparently taken from Courlander's book The African. Haley at first dismissed the charge, but later issued a public statement affirming that Courlander's book had been the source, and Haley attributed the error to a mistake of one of his assistant researchers.^[3]

Plot summary

Africa

Haley's novel begins with Kunta's birth in 1750 in the Mandinka-speaking village of Juffure in The Gambia, West Africa. Kunta is the eldest of four sons of the Mandinka tribesman Omoro and his wife Binta Kebba. Haley describes Kunta's strict Muslim upbringing, the rigors of the manhood training he undergoes, and the proud origins of the Kinte name.

In 1765 Kunta is reported to have been taken into manhood training. One day that year, he was sent to hunt a bird without a weapon. While hunting the bird he spotted slave hunters, ran back to his village and told the inhabitants what he had seen.

One day in 1767, while Kunta was searching for wood to make a drum, four men chased him, surrounded him and took him captive. Kunta awakened to find himself blindfolded, gagged, bound, and a prisoner of white men. He and others were put on a slave ship for the three-month Middle Passage voyage to North America.

America

Kunta survives the trip to Maryland and is sold to a Virginia plantation owner, Master Waller, who renames him "Toby". He rejects the name imposed by his owners and refuses to speak to others.

After being recaptured during the last of his four escape attempts, the slave catchers give him a choice: he can be castrated or have his right foot cut off. He chooses to have his foot cut off, and the men cut off the front half of his right foot. As the years pass, Kunta resigns himself to his fate and also becomes more open and sociable with his fellow slaves, while never forgetting who he was or where he came from.

Family

Kunta eventually marries another slave named Belle Waller and has a daughter named Kizzy (Keisa, in Mandingo), which in Kunta's native tongue means "to stay put". When Kizzy is in her late teens, she is sold away to North Carolina when her master discovers that she had written a fake traveling pass for a young slave boy with whom she was in love (she had been taught to read and write secretly by Missy Anne, niece to the plantation owner). Her new owner immediately rapes her and fathers her only child, George, who spends his life with the tag "Chicken George", because of his assigned duties of tending to his master's cockfighting birds.

In the novel, Kizzy never learns her parents' fate. She spends the remainder of her life as a field hand on the Lea plantation in North Carolina. In the miniseries, she is taken back to visit the Reynolds plantation later in life. She discovers that her mother was sold off to another plantation and that her father died of a broken heart two years later, in 1822. She finds his grave, where she crosses out his slave name from the tombstone and writes his original name instead.

The rest of the book tells the story of the generations between Kizzy and Alex Haley, describing their suffering, losses and eventual triumphs in America. Alex Haley was a seventh-generation descendant of Kunta Kinte.^[4]

Sources

Haley's sources for the origins of Kinte were oral family tradition and a man he found in The Gambia named Kebba Kanga Fofana, who claimed knowledge of the Kintes. He described them as a family in which the men were blacksmiths, descended from a marabout named Kairaba Kunta Kinte, originally from Mauretania. Haley quoted Fofana as telling him: "About the time the king's soldiers came, the eldest of these four sons, Kunta, went away from this village to chop wood and was never seen again."^[5]

Haley also conceded in a legal action that much of the detail of Kinte's life was drawn from The African, a book by Harold Courlander.^[6]

Influence

There is an annual Kunta Kinte Heritage Festival held in Maryland.^[7] Kunta Kinte also inspired a reggae rhythm of the same name, performed by artists including The Revolutionaries,^[8] and Mad Professor, and an album, Kunta Kinte Roots by Ranking Dread.^[9] There is also a band of the same name.^[10] He is mentioned in the Kanye West song "Never Let Me Down" from the College Dropout album. He is also mentioned in the songs "Whip It" by Lil Wayne, "Work It" by Missy Elliott, "Finale" by Young Money, A Tribe Called Quest's "8 Million Stories", Roots Manuva's "Snake Bite", Ghostface Killah's "Black Jesus", Akir's "Kunta Kinte", Busta Rhymes's "Rhymes Galore", Ice Cube's "No Vaseline", Keymark's Pookey Marsum, The Coup's "My Favourite Mutiny", Bloodhound Gang's "A Lapdance Is So Much Better When The Stripper Is Crying", and Roll Deep's "Roll Deep Rally" which is featured on the soundtrack for the 2010 film Shank. Flow Dan can be heard saying "I'm on the run like Kunta..." on RZA's "Must Be Bobby". He also influences the Bay Area rapper Keak da Sneak where Keak was nicknamed Kunta Kinte.

An early scene in the film Boyz n the Hood includes one of the characters asking Jason "Furious" Styles' son Tré, "Who's he think you is, Kunta Kinte?" after seeing the chores that the son must complete. On an episode of the HBO drama The Wire, Baltimore police detective Bunk Moreland derogatorily refers to an African seaman as "Kunta Kinte" during an interrogation in which the seaman refuses to speak English. In the film Coming to America, Akeem (an African prince posing as a poor exchange student) is teased by the employees and patrons of a barbershop, who good-naturedly refer to him as "Kunta Kinte".

In the Fresh Prince of Bel Air, Will Smith's character says, in regards to being punished, "Why don't you just do me like Kunta Kinte and cut off my foot?"^[11]

On the January 19, 2002 broadcast of Saturday Night Live's Weekend Update sketch, host Jimmy Fallon, while reporting on ABC's refusal to show the Roots 25th anniversary special, gave a quick recap on the Roots story, stating: "For those of you who don’t remember Roots, it follows a saga of Kunta Kinte from young African tribesman, to slavery, to becoming literate, and eventually being the top of his class at Starfleet Academy".^[12]

References