I came back to this country enormously bewildered. I didn’t know what to do. It embarrasses me to say that up to that time I really hadn’t thought all that much about Africa. I knew where it was and I had the standard cliché images of it, the Tarzan Africa and stuff like that. Well, now it was almost as if some religious zealotry came into me. I just began to devour everything I could lay eyes on about Africa, particularly slavery. I can remember after reading all day I’d sit on the edge of a bed at night with a map of Africa, studying the positions of the countries, one with relation with the other.

It was about six weeks later when an innocuous looking letter came to me which suggested that when it was possible I should come back. I was back over there as quick as I could make it. The same men, with whom I had previously talked rather matter-of-factly, told me that the word had been put out in the back country and that there had findeed been found a griot of the Kinte clan. His name, they said, was Kebba Kanga Fofana. When I heard there was such a man I was ready to have a it. Where is he? I figured from my experience as an American magazine writer, the government should have had him there with a public relations man for me to talk to. They looked at me oddly and they said, he’s in his village.

I discovered at that point that if I was to see this man, I was going to have to do something I’d never dreamed before: I would have to organize a safari. It took me three days to rent a launch to get up the river, lorry, Land-Rover to take supplies by the back route, to hire finally a total of fourteen people, including three interpreters, four musicians (they told me in the back country these old oral historians would not talk without music in the background), bearers and so forth. On the fourth day we went vibrating in this launch up the Gambia River. I was very uncomfortable. I had the feeling of being alien. I had the queasy feeling of what do they see me as, another pith-helmet? We got up the river to a little village called Albreda on the left bank. Then we went ashore. Now our destination by foot was a village called Juffure where this man was said to live.

There’s an expression called ‘the peak experience’. It is that which emotionally nothing in your life ever can transcend. I know I have had mine that first day in the back country in black West Africa. When we got up within sight of the village of Juffure the children who had inevitably been playing outside African villages, gave the word and the people came locking out of their huts. It’s a rather small village, only about seventy people. Villages in the back country are very much today as they were two hundred years ago, circular mud huts with conical thatched roofs. From a distance I could see this small man with a pillbox hat and an off- white robe, and even from a distance there was an aura of ‘some bodiness’ about him. I just knew that was the man we had come to see. When we got closer the interpreters left our party and went straight to him. I had stepped unwittingly into a sequence of emotional events that always I feel awkward trying to describe, simply because I never ever verbally could convey, the physical power of emotional occurrences.