ABSTRACT
To millions of people all over the world, the enslavement of Africans is best illustrated by the capture sequence in the television version of Alex Haley’s novel Roots. In the film, the protagonist, Kunta Kinte, an inhabitant of Juffure in Niumi on the Gambia River, is alone in the woods when he is suddenly beset by a group of “slatees” led by an American factor. Using a large hunting net, they bring Kinte down and, in spite of his attempts to run and fight, capture him.1 Speaking from a strictly statistical viewpoint, such a story is unlikely. However, since the slave trade involved thousands of active participants over 400 years and millions of square kilometres, it is impossible to say that such an event did not ever happen, or even that it could not happen at Juffure in 1769. After all, the fact that the English director at James Fort on the Gambia was instructed in 1765 to intervene if traders should seize free people illegally2 certainly implies that at least sometimes English traders did capture people directly and illegally. But given the general military situation it is obvious that such activities had to be marginal to the larger slave trade. Certainly, the Gambia was not routinely the scene of unchecked slave raiding of this sort, given the tight control that the rulers exercised over the activities of European traders there. Slatees, in fact, were Muslim traders who bought slaves in the farther interior, not the thugs who helped factors wrestle people to the ground on the banks of the Gambia.3
