Correlating what he had been told with the facts he found in libraries and other repositories of official data, Haley discovered how accurate the information was that his relatives had passed down to him. He heard the history of his ancestors from his grandmother and his cousin, who “had talked the family narrative on the. Roots is based on the oral tradition that Haley’s family handed down through seven generations. The most common food staple is couscous, which the women of the village pound with mortars the men still paddle pirogues (dugout canoes) to work in the distant couscous and cotton fields. Silk-cotton tree branches form the roof beams, the roof itself being thatched from long grasses and millet straw. Many still live in huts made from a material called banco, which is a mixture of straw and sun-dried clay and is similar to adobe brick. Ninety percent of Gambians are practicing Muslims. Peanuts grown for export provide almost all of the country’s income. Gambians are comprised of three ethnic groups: Mandingo, Fula, and Wolof.

Daily life for residents in Juffure had, by the time when Haley visited there in the 1970s, changed little since 1750 lack of modern conveniences such as telephone service and electricity had preserved traditional ways of life there more easily than in cities, although items such as Western-style clothing and portable radios were not uncommon. Juffure is situated more than 100 miles upstream from the mouth of the Gambia River. In modern times the continent’s smallest nation, the Gambia abuts the Atlantic Ocean on the west, while its other three sides border Senegal. The Gambia stretches along a narrow fertile belt (295 miles in length and between 15 and 30 miles wide) on both sides of the Gambia River. Roots begins with the mid-eighteenth century birth of Haley’s ancestor, Kunta Kinte, in the small village of Juffure in the Gambia, a land in West Africa. Events in History at the Time of the Biography Life in Juffure As a young adult he joined the Coast Guard, and when he left the service he landed a job writing biographical stories for Reader’s Digest, a journal that would eventually sponsor some of the research and travel that made Roots possible. Haley heard stories during his childhood about his heritage from his grandmother and from other elderly female relatives. A fictionalized biography spanning more than two centuries (1750-1976) and set mainly in the Gambia (West Africa), Virginia, and North Carolina published in 1976.Īlex Haley traces some 225 years of his family’s history-from his ancestors in Africa, through the trials of American slavery, to his own adulthood in the year of the American bicentennial.Įvents in History at the Time of the Biographyīorn in Ithaca, New York, in 1921, Alex Haley was raised in Henning, Tennessee, by his maternal grandmother.

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