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The African
By John Temple Ligon
Temple@TheColumbiaStar.com

Warner Montgomery discusses slave trade in West Africa.

Dr. Warner Montgomery spoke at the Torch Club last week at its monthly dinner. He began with the story of Kunta Kinte, the hero in Alex Haley's Roots.

In 1750, Kunta Kinte was born in the village of Juffure in The Gambia of West Africa.

In 1767, Kunta left his village to find materials to make a drum. He was captured by white slave traders. Kunta made the voyage to Annapolis, where he was sold to a plantation owner.

The novel Roots sold well and became a television movie. Haley, the author, had to pay $650,000, admitting large passages of Roots were copied from The African by Harold Courlander.

Haley is hailed as history's best- selling African- American author, but his work is excluded from the Norton Anthology of African- American Literature.

Montgomery shared some concerns over the veracity of Roots , particularly the capture of Kunta. The native population of West Africa was more than 60% slaves. There was no reason to capture slaves when so much was readily for sale by their native owners. The section of West Africa cited as Kunta's origin was the home of pliable, deal- making slave factories, native retail operations eager to trade with the American and European captains of slave ships.

One of these captains, Stiles Lightburn, was connected by blood to people in Charleston and Savannah. His brother Francis operated a rice plantation on Wadmalaw Island. His sister Mary married Thomas Bennet, the mayor of Charleston. His brother Samuel was a leading grocer and shipper in Savannah and welcomed Maj. Gen. Thomas Pinckney to Savannah at the outbreak of the War of 1812.

Capt. Stiles Lightburn married Elizabeth Bailey Gomez, daughter of an African chief. She became a chief (Queen Niara Bely) after her husband disappeared in 1833. Niara Bely and her son Stiles Jr. established a trading empire and signed the treaty that gave France control of Guinea.

The market for slaves in the American South shot up with the invention of the cotton gin in the 1790s. The French abolished slavery at the outset of their revolution in 1789. The English ended the slave importation in 1808 and slavery altogether in 1834.

Napoleon reinstated the French slave trade. Brazil didn't abolish slavery until the 1880s. The outcome of the Civil War ended slavery in the U.S. in 1865.