Kunta Kinte Island
on Duncan in the Gambia (The Gambia), 13/Apr/2011 23:32, 34 days ago
I visited Kunta Kinte Island with friends today. After a 7AM start it was just a swift drive, and then a ferry, and then a drive, and then a walk, and then another ferry away from where we’re staying in the Kombo. The island used to be called James Island and was used by the British in the 1700s as a holding area for people captured in the mainland before they were taken to South America and the Caribbean to be sold as slaves. Its recently been rechristened by the Gambian president as Kunta Kinte Island in honour ofthe hero of the book(and TV series) Roots, which is partly set on the island. There was an incredibly complex system to pay to enter the village, to enter the museum, to have a guide, to get the boat to the island and to enter the island but in the end it was still pretty reasonable and I guess you can’t really come to the Gambia without visiting. The museum was great - I’d say even better than the national museum in Banjul. There was lots of information, all very well presented; although as usual with the Gambia there was some ambiguity about facts and dates (were the “French sailors” French or Lebanese? or even sailors?). What the museum was clear on was how slave trade took the more productive people out of villages killed them or dispersed them around the world and left just those too young or too old to provide for themselves. I think if you were trying to engineer a wayto damage a society, an economy and a culture you couldn’t find may ways more effective than the slave trade.After the museum we had a tour of the island itself. Apparently its about a quarter of the size it was in the 1700s. A lot of the buildings have fallen into the sea(river?) over the last hundred years so we only had a look around the central building but that was enough to get a bit of an idea of the conditions people were held in. Apparently holding people in the island was actually intended to make people weaker so that only the stronger people would survive to go on to the next stage of the journey. A quick bailout later our boat was ready to take us back to shore. We ran through the gauntlet of wood-carving sellers in search of cashews to sustain us through the walk and then the drive and then the ferry and then the drive back home.