April 15, 2025

(The sound of the cracking of a whip)

“Your name is Toby. You are going to learn to say it. Let me hear you say it.”

“What is your name?”

“Kunta.” “Kunta Kinteh.”

(The sound of cries as the whip cracks again)

“When the Master gives you something you take it. And it is going to be your name the rest of your life.”

“What is your name?”

“My name is Kunta.” “Kunta Kinteh.”

Slavery didn’t start in Virginia. It started on the banks of the Gambia River. History wasn’t written down, it was spoken. A name was never a label; it was a story. The people of West Africa were not waiting to be discovered. They herded goats, they learned The Quran and they knew their history. Your name was your identity rooted in a rich heritage.

As the Amazon River was the life force of Brazil the Gambia River was the life blood for West Africans. Slowly the river that had always carried life began to carry lives away. A few, then thousands, tens of thousands and then millions 12 million to be exact. A teenage boy disappears. Someone had decided that his body had a price. A living breathing human being becomes cargo. The Gambia River becomes a river of heartache.

With any enslaved people your name was first to go. When you take away someone’s name you sever their roots, you take away their history. But the slaves would not denounce their identity easily. They braided rice seeds in their hair as a reminder of home. They sang songs in secret languages. They told stories. Lots and lots of stories. Overtime, even over oceans, these stories found their way back home. The traders stole people, but they could not steal the stories.

In 1884, at The Berlin Conference, European leaders set around a large conference table dividing Africa like slices of a cake. No Africans were invited to the table. Gambia stayed British while neighboring Senegal became part of French West Africa. Yet this brutal division could not stop these two nations from ultimately gaining freedom. Senegal in 1960, Gambia in 1965.

Yet, Hugh Trevor Roper, the distinguished professor of history at Oxford University made one of the most racist comments I have ever heard when he said in 1963 about Africa: “Perhaps in the future there will be some African history to teach. But at present there is none. There is only the history of the European in Africa.”

It was not only the traders who tried to steal Africa’s identity but the elite of the day who strived to suppress it. These were not slaves being beaten, but memories being beaten, it was history being beaten with the hope that none would survive.

The dialogue that began this blog is the actual dialogue from the 1977 TV miniseries “Roots.” I was mesmerized by the story of the young African Kunta Kinteh, who was captured and sold into slavery in Virginia. Alex Haley’s book (Roots: The Saga of an American Family, upon which the miniseries was based) follows Kunta Kinteh and his ancestors, leading seven generations later to Haley.

The Gambian village of Jufureh is said to be where the eighth generation from Kunta Kinteh on the African side lives. You take a ferry to get there.

As we were departing Gambia the ferry from Jufureh was arriving at the port. Regardless of the efforts of slavery, despite the attempts to divide Africa like slices of a cake and over the prejudicial language of a college professor Africa does have a history and it has survived. You want proof. Look at the name of the ferry. Look at the people disembarking the ferry. They are not slaves. They are free, proud, West Africans!

I had some time to spend with some of those free proud West Africans.

Thanks for traveling with us.

(If you are wondering why, you have not seen some updates from Thirdmill from my travels in Brazil it is because the Thirmill curriculum has not yet been translated into Portuguese. Portuguese is recognized as one of the ten most strategic ‘Gateway’ languages, central hubs in linguistic networks. Thirdmill has full or partial curricula in the other nine ‘most strategic Gateway languages’ (English, Hindi, Arabic, Mandarin, French, Indonesian, Swahili, Spanish, and Russian). The exciting news is that Portuguese is one of the next languages to be translated. The Global Languages Coordinator (Oscar Zapata from Venezuela) has identified people in Brazil to translate and review manuscripts. All of the translated documents must be reviewed and approved to be theologically accurate.  It is thrilling that this dream for Thirdmill may soon become a reality.)