Kunta Kinteh Island

Kunta Kinteh Island is a scrap of land in the middle of the Gambia River, thirty kilometres upstream from Banjul, where the river is still so wide that both banks are a haze: the Duchy of Courland built a fort on it in 1651, the British took it in 1661 and named it James Island, and for two centuries it was a place where people were held before the ships. The river has eaten five-sixths of it; what remains — a few walls, baobabs, the ghost of the fort — was listed by UNESCO in 2003 with the villages on the north bank that share its story: Juffureh, the village Alex Haley named in Roots as the home of Kunta Kinte, taken in 1767, where his descendants still keep a compound; Albreda, with the French trading house of the CFAO, the flagpole a slave who reached it was said to be freed at, and the museum of slavery in the old Maurel Frères building; and San Domingo, the ruin of a Portuguese chapel from the fifteenth century. Downstream, at the mouth, Fort Bullen at Barra and the Six-Gun Battery in Banjul were built to stop the trade the island had served.

The traveller takes the day boat from Banjul up the river — the pelicans, the mangroves, the fishermen's pirogues — to Albreda's jetty, and walks with a village guide: the museum first, for the whole story of the river; the CFAO building and the flagpole; the path to Juffureh and the Kinte compound, where a member of the family will greet him and expect a small gift; and then the short crossing to the island itself, to stand among the baobabs and the broken walls with the river all around. Or he crosses on the Barra ferry with the trucks and the market women, takes a car along the north bank and does it in the other order, with Fort Bullen at the end. Either way the day closes on the river, and the traveller sleeps in Banjul or on the coast.

The Guide's honesty: this is a place of memory before it is an excursion — walk it slowly, let the guides from the villages speak, give the Kinte family the small gift the visit asks and do not turn the compound into a photograph; historians treat Roots as a novel with a true wound in it, and the village answers, rightly, that the wound is the point; the day boat is the easiest way and fills in season — book; the Barra ferry is an experience of its own, slow and full; the island erodes a little every year, and the traveller sees a place that is disappearing; the river is beautiful and its birds are a second reason to come; and the Gambia is small, English-speaking, poor and kind — the traveller who spends here rather than only at the coast has understood the country.