The Lady Jaclene, out of Ramsgate, pushed slowly up the river, red ensign flapping in the hot salt-scented breeze. The River Gambia here was so wide I could see nothing of land save for a hazy grey-blue smear on the horizon on either side. Time crept past. I felt adrift in a strange land with no way to get my bearings. Then, around noon, a smudge in the river ahead began to come into focus, resolving itself slowly into the outline of a speck of land. The skeletal outlines of trees rose above the skeletal outlines of a low stone fort, its ramparts crenellated like the teeth of a jaw, its empty windows staring out sightlessly towards the African mainland. Anyone who knows their Joseph Conrad would have had the exact same words form in their head as I did: “And this also has been one of the dark places of the earth…”

Kunta Kinteh Island and its related sites is the easiest of The Gambia’s two World Heritage Sites to visit. It is the furthest downstream, making it the nearest to the tourist resorts of the Atlantic coast. And it is widely available as a set day trip. We booked for the following day via a tourist agency on the Senegambia Strip. It is commonly referred to as the ‘Roots’ tour, after Alex Haley’s book chronicling the abduction of a young man – Kunta Kinteh – from his village of Juffureh, his enslavement, his shipment via James Island to the slave markets of the United States of America, and the lives of his descendents. The fact that the government formally renamed the midstream lump of rock after the locally-born Kunta Kinteh, away from a name given to it by the European slavers (James Island), shows the power of names.  It signifies the reclamation of that heritage by recognising the victim, not the oppressor.

The north-bank town of Albreda, a huddle of white buildings gathered around a long jetty, serves as a first introduction to the site. A local guide, Lamin, employed by the community, showed us the ‘Never Again’ statue and a Royal Navy cannon installed to suppress the slave trade. He also showed us three buildings that are key parts of the World Heritage Site – the Portuguese chapel (the first church in West Africa), the remains of the Compagnie Francaise d'Afrique Occidentale warehouse (being renovated at the time of our visit), and the Maurel Frères factory (‘factory’ being used in its original context of a warehouse and trading depot). The latter houses a small, rather basic but still informative museum on the slave trade. The exhibits mainly seemed to be reproductions or on loan from Cape Castle, Ghana. While these sites certainly document the encounter of Europe and Africa their link to the slave trade is, as best, tenuous. The Maurel Frères factory was not constructed until 1840, some 33 years after Britain had abolished the slave trade. The CFAO warehouse is of uncertain date, but a building stood on that site by 1847. Only the Portuguese chapel, constructed in the 15th century, is clearly coterminous with the era of the slave trade.

The tours then detour up the road to Juffureh. We were introduced to the female village chief and then the compound of the Kinteh family. Binta Kinteh, who greeted us along with her daughter and nephew, is, we were told, eight generations down from the sister of Kunta Kinteh. We were permitted to take photos with her, or to buy a certificate or a book. Proof that the main attraction of these tours is the link to the book and TV series of Roots rather than because of WHS status.

Kunta Kinteh island is less than a third of the size it was in its 18th-19th century heyday. Originally the tumbledown fort was almost pentagonal with a central keep surrounded by four angular bastions. Now only the built-up curtain walls and the northern wall of the keep still stand. There was one underground room. Unlike Ian we were told that this was the ‘slave dungeon’, though only for the more truculent captives as those more resigned to their fate would have been housed in specific slave-row houses outside the fort itself. The narration provided a certain mordant irony about European senses of propriety while dealing in human flesh. Women and children were never chained together – because that would have been inhumane! And the first anti-slavery campaigners did not object to the institution of slavery per se, just its cruellest aspects like branding and thumbscrews. The initial anti-slavery campaigners were the animal rights activists of their day: they didn’t mind the cow being eaten as long as it was looked after prior to its trip to the abattoir.

So: a crumbling fortress being eaten away by the river, a couple of warehouses that post-dated the slave trade and an old Portuguese chapel. None of these in and of themselves possess OUV in my view. But they represent the encounter between civilisations, an encounter where one party preyed upon the other (before finally paternalistically coming to ‘protect’ them). The buildings – much like the Kinteh clan you meet in Juffureh – are symbolic of the human cost of slavery. The truth of the story of Kunta Kinteh as related in Roots is highly debatable. But it is still a story that needs to be told to underline the human impact. The Roots tour to me had the air of a medieval indulgence. For those of a western European background the journey is a form of atonement for the original sin of slavery. For African-Americans it is a search for a symbolic fountainhead. But while the incurious can ease their conscience, it certainly made me consider whether my family, hailing partially from the cotton-weaving towns of Lancashire carried any guilt for slavery. In that respect, a visit to Kunta Kinteh Island was a much more uncomfortable experience for me than, say, our later visit to Zanzibar (where the British are hailed for ending the Arab slave trade).

 

World Heritage-iness: 2.5

My Experience: 2

(Visited January 2013)