Roots: The Saga of an American Family Chapters 1-5 Summary

The year: 1750. The place: Juffure, a small village near "the coast of The Gambia, West Africa" (1.1).
It's happy occasion because Omoro and Binta Kinte have just welcomed their first child, a bouncing baby boy, helped into this world by Grandmother Yaisa and an old midwife named Nyo Boto.
We watch a typical morning in Juffure as women make food and men sing Islamic songs of worship. Seems like a nice place.
Omoro can't join in, however. As is the tradition of his tribe, the Mandinka, a father must spend seven days thinking of a child's name before announcing it. It's a big deal, people.
Fast-forward to the eighth day. The entire village has gathered for a ceremony in honor of the new infant.
During a break in the festivities, Omoro goes up to the child and whispers the name into his ear.
It's Kunta, after Omoro's dad, Kairaba Kunta Kinte, a legit holy man who had "saved the people of Juffure from a famine" (1.12).
No pressure or anything, kid.

It's getting to the rainy season, so the men of the village are preparing the soil for crops. Meanwhile, the women work on rice plots while carrying their children.
Kunta and Binta are pretty much inseparable. The kid gets barrels full of love from both his mom and his Grandma Yaisa.
It's customary for husbands and wives to live separately, so Kunta occasionally spends an evening chilling with his dad. Omoro clearly adores his kid.
And so on and so on until all of the sudden Kunta is walking. Time flies, huh?

Jump ahead three years, which are known by "rains" (3.1). We're in the middle of the hottest season of the year, so the villagers are having hard times.
In short time, however, the heat breaks and the rain begins to fall. That's a really big deal, because that means the villagers can plant crops and actually eat some decent food.
To honor this occasion, the villagers perform a fertility ritual in which the women plant new seeds into the fields while chanting ancient prayers.
In Juffure, the age of a child is marked by "kafos"—the first kafo being the lowest. Kunta and all other kids under five are in that one.
Kunta loves spending time with the bald bachelorette Nyo Boto, who tells stories to the children.
There's one about a boy who frees a crocodile from a net, only to be trapped in its teeth. The boy is saved by a rabbit, so his family returns and kills both animals for food.
The moral? It is "the way of the world" that goodness is sometimes repaid with badness (3.16).

Now that it's the rainy season, it's raining practically every day. There's nothing Kunta and his playmates love more than gallivanting outside during a morning shower.
They can't do it at night, however, because that's when the rain gets serious, causing floods in "the lowlands near the river" (4.1). Still, given how dry it gets here, it's still not enough.
The villagers perform a series of rituals to invoke a big rain, and after five days, it finally does. After a few days of this, the countryside has visibly burst to life.
Despite this, the people are still starving—none of the crops are ready for harvest. They're forced to subsist instead on insects, roots, and whatever small animals they can snag.

As the people of Juffure continue to starve, sickness rises. You know that someone's died when you hear "high-pitched howling of a woman" (5.1).
Kunta has a sore on his leg, so Grandma Yaisa fixes him up with some ingenious techniques, like suturing the sore with ant pinchers.
She also takes the opportunity to tell him about his grandpa. Kairaba Kunta Kinte was born in Mauretania, a country in North America located roughly where Morocco is today.
Kairaba became a holy man when he was thirty-five. Once he did this, he began wandering south in the hopes of finding a village that needed help.
After helping out a few small communities, Kairaba ended up in Juffure, which was in the midst of one of its worst droughts ever. He prayed for five days and suddenly the rain came.
The King of Barra rewarded Kairaba with a "choice virgin" named Sireng, which says a little bit about gender dynamics in this society (5.9). They had two kids: Janneh and Saloum.
Soon after, however, Kairaba saw Yaisa for the first time and fell madly in love. They were married (men can have multiple wives in around these parts) and had Omoro, Kunta's dad.
That night, Kunta thinks about his grandfather's legacy and how he will continue it for generations to come.