It was Thursday morning when I heard those words, Monday morning I was in Africa. I just had to go. There was no sense in messing around. On Friday I found that of the numerous African students in this country, there were a few from that very, very small country called Gambia. The one who physically was closest to me was a fellow in Hamilton College, Clinton, New York. I hit that campus about 3:30 Friday afternoon and practically snatched Ebou Manga out of an economics class and got us on Pan American that night. We flew through the night to Dakar, Senegal, where we caught a light plane that flew over to a little airstrip called Yundum – they literally had to run monkeys off the runway to get in there. Then we got a van and we went into the small city of Bathurst, the capital of Gambia. Ebou Manga, his father Alhaji Manga (it’s a predominantly Moslem culture there), assembled a group of about eight men, members of the government, who came into the patio of the Atlantic Hotel, and they sat in kind of a semi-circle as I told them the history that had come down across the family to my grandmother and thence to me; told them everything I could remember.

When I finished, the Africans irritated me considerably because Kamby Bolongo, the sounds which had gotten me specifically to them, they tended almost to poo-poo. They said, “Well, of course Kamby Bolongo would mean Gambia River; anyone would know that.” What these Africans reacted to was another sound: a mere two syllables that I had brought them without the slightest comprehension that it had any particular significance. They said, “There may be some significance in that your forefather stated his name was Kin-tay.” I said, “Well, there was nothing more explicit in the story than the pronunciation of his name, Kin-tay.”

They said, “Our oldest villages tend to be named for those families which founded those villages centuries ago.” Then they sent for a little map and they said, “Look, here is the village of Kinte-Kundah, and not too far from it is the village of Kinte-Kundah-Janneh-Ya.” then they told me about something I never had any concept existed in this world. They told me that in the back country, and particularly in the older villages of the back country, there were old men called griots, who are in effect walking, living archives of oral history. They are the old men who, from the time they had been in their teen-ages, have been part of a line of men who tell the stories as they have been told since the time of their forefathers, literally down across centuries. The incumbent griot will be a man usually in his late sixties, early seventies, and underneath him will be men separated by about decade intervals, sixty, fifty, forty, thirty, twenty, and a teen-age boy, and each line of griots will be the experts in the story of a major family clan; another line of griots another clan; and so on for dozens of group of villages. Another would go into the history of the empires which had preceded it, and so forth. The stories were told in a narrative, oral history way, not verbatim, but the essential same way they had been told down across the time since the forefathers. The way they were trained was that the teen-age boy was exposed to that story for forty or fifty years before he would become the oral historian incumbent.

It astounds us now to realize that men like these, not only in Africa but other cultures, can literally talk for days telling a story in the most explicit details and not repeat themselves. The reason it astounds us is because in our culture we have become so conditioned to the crush of print that most people have almost forgotten what the human memory is capable of if it is trained to keep things in it. These men, I was told, existed in the back country, and they told me that since my forefather had said his name was Kin-tay they would see what they could do to help me.