On the north bank of the river Gambia, about 1 hour by boat from the capital Banjul sits the small inauspicious village of Juffureh. This village was put firmly on the world map as a consequence of American author Alex Haley whose global best-selling novel Roots traced the history of his family back from modern times to an African ancestor who was kidnapped from near Juffureh in The Gambia, transported to the Americas and forced into a life of slavery. Whilst Haley’s novel was well-received and was even made into a successful internationally-distributed TV series Haley became the subject of litigation with the claim that material in his book was plagiarised from Harold Courlander’s novel The African. Others attacked the veracity of Haley’s research claiming that the paper-trail of documentary evidence linking his family ancestry with the ‘taking’ of Kunta Kinte in The Gambia was at best tenuous and being ultimately reliant upon an oral history handed down through the centuries by the “Kinte” family could not be proven. The debate on such aspects of Haley’s work is an irrelevance as the real importance of the novel is that it highlights the horrors & untold suffering of millions of people as a consequence of greed and subsequently, racism. Haley’s novel, by telling a compelling family story effectively informed the world regarding the true horrors of slavery and in particular the transatlantic African Slave trade.
After Haley’s visit to Juffureh in The Gambia a small local museum was built to educate & inform visitors regarding the history and nature of slavery with particular emphasis on its impact locally. Sadly this little museum is poorly funded with rather limited resources however the importance of its message is such that it really deserves to receive international funding. Nearby James Island has in recent times been made an UNESCO International Heritage Site in view of its importance in telling the horrific story of the African Slave trade.
This gallery documents a few images from James Island & the Juffureh Slavery museum.