30th annual Kunta Kinte Heritage Festival

From 30th annual Kunta Kinte Heritage Festival Website:

The Kunta Kinte Heritage Festival is a cultural celebration for all to enjoy live music and dance, world foods and artisan vendors, as well as heritage of the African Diaspora. All to commemorate Kunta Kinte's arrival in Annapolis and his struggle to preserve his cultural heritage.

The festival features over 80 arts & crafts and education & community vendors! Food vendors include soul food, Caribbean, West African, seafood, bean pies, sweets and more! The children's activity tent is brought to us by Chesapeake Children's Museum! The Petting Zoo @ KuntaKinteFest features real goats and chickens!

In September 1987, the Kunta Kinte Celebration was born in Annapolis, Maryland and it is now known as the Kunta Kinte Heritage Festival. The festival is a celebration of the perseverance, education, and cultural heritage of Africans, African Americans, and Caribbean people of African descent.

According to the book Roots, on the day of the birth of Kunta Kinte in 1750, in Gambia, West Africa, his grandmother Yaisa, laughed with joy as she witnessed the birth and special blessings of the firstborn boy of her son Omoro and his wife, Binta. Eight days later, during the naming ceremonies, the Alimamo prayed over the infant, entreating Allah to grant him long life, success in bringing credit and pride and many children to his family, to his village, to his tribe -- and finally, the strength and the spirit to deserve and to bring honor to the name he was about to receive.

In his writings, author Alex Haley, depicts the scene so vividly that one can imagine being in the very spot on that eventful day. One seems a part of the history of an African family whose distinguished lineage is being recited as far back as two hundred years, as the Arafan (the village Griot) lists the names of the Maurentanian forefathers of whom Kunta's Grandfather and namesake Kairaba Kunta Kinte, had often told himself. The names were great and many for the Mandinka tribes's holy man. And this distinguished lineage and the oral history continue today through their descendants of the present, the author himself, his brother George, former state senator from Kansas and their youngest brother, Julius.

Roots, the saga of an American Family, is a documentary dedicated to the Haley's family Griot, their grandmother, Cynthia Haley who told the stories of her ancestry to her grandchildren, among whom was Alex Haley. He listened intently and, after many years of research and journeys in search of the facts, was able to produce, in writing, substantiation of that oral history. His grandmothers's recountings of the family history perpetuated it in the minds of her children, who in turn passed it on to the minds of men all over the world, for all times. She created the symbol for all Africans of black American families, and thus she helped all of us to know, as the author pointed out "...who we are."