![]() ![]() The young people of the village are divided into kafo groups, which contain all the children in five-year increments. Men pay a dowry in goats and cows to a girl’s family when they marry her. Men marry around age 30 and girls around age 14. Men live in their own huts from the third kafo (age 11-15) onward, and women live in huts with their children. Men are the heads of families and their wives are subservient to them. The village largely lives harvest to harvest, engaged most of the time in difficult farming work but taking time to relax at the annual harvest festival. They survive by the cycle of the rains, which bring fertility to the land but also famine and illness when they do not come. ![]() Kunta’s father Omoro takes seven days to select his son’s name, as is the custom, and chooses to name him after Omoro’s father and Kunta’s grandfather, Kairaba Kunta Kinte, whose family was long ago from Mali, and who came to Juffure from Mauretania and saved the village from a famine.Īs Kunta grows up, Haley describes all the rituals of the village, their religious beliefs, taboos, lifestyles, and petty gossip. He grows up in a Mandinka village, Juffure, in The Gambia, where people’s primary occupation is farming (groundnuts, couscous and cotton for the men, rice for the women). Kunta Kinte is born in the spring of 1750 to Omoro and Binta Kinte. ![]()
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