Kunta Kinte

Kunta Kinte 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, based on the book. Haley described his book as faction - a mixture of fact and fiction. While Kunta Kinte was supposedly an ancestor of Haley, his plagiarism of Harold Courlander's The African cast doubt on the veracity of these claims.

Character profile

Kunta Kinte is a Muslim of the Mandinka tribe. He is captured and brought as a slave to Annapolis, Maryland, and later sold to a plantation owner in Spotsylvania County, Virginia near the present-day rural community of Partlow.

In the miniseries, the younger version of the character was portrayed by LeVar Burton, and the older version by John Amos.

Plot summary

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

One day in 1767, when young Kunta leaves his village to find wood to make a drum, he is attacked by four men who surround him and take him captive. Kunta awakens to find himself blindfolded, gagged, bound and prisoner of the white men. Haley describes how they humiliate him by stripping him naked, probing him in every orifice, and branding him with a hot iron. He and others are put on a slave ship for the nightmarish three-month voyage to America.

Kunta survives the trip to Maryland, and is sold to a Virginia plantation owner who renames him "Toby." He rejects the name imposed by his owners, and reminds his fellow slaves, when they refer to him as Toby, of his African name.

After being apprehended during the last of his four escape attempts, the slave catchers give him a choice of either castration or having part of his foot cut off; he chooses the latter. As the years pass, Kunta eventually 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.

He eventually marries another slave named Bell Waller and has a daughter named Kizzy (Keisa, in Mandinka/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 she was in love with (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 new master's cockfighting brood).

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 Waller plantation later in life. She discovers that her mother was sold off to another plantation, and that her father died of a broken heart four years later, in 1810. She finds his grave, where she crosses out his slave name from the tombstone and writes his real name above it.

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.

Influence

There is an annual Kunta Kinte Heritage Festival held in Maryland. Kunta Kinte also inspired a reggae rhythm of the same name, performed by artists including The Revolutionaries, and Mad Professor, and an album, Kunta Kinte Roots by Ranking Dread. There is also a band of the same name. 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, A Tribe Called Quest's "8 Million Stories," the Bloodhound Gang's song "A Lap Dance Is So Much Better When the Stripper Is Crying," Akir's "Kunta Kinte," Busta Rhymes's "Rhymes Galore" and Ice Cube's "No Vaseline."

In the United States, the name "Kunta Kinte" has become somewhat of a euphemism for African slaves, and sometimes even Africans in general. 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 which 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 where 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."