Kunta Kinte was based on family oral tradition accounts of one of Haley's ancestors, a Gambian man who was born around 1767, enslaved, and taken to America where he died around 1822.

[1] Kunta Kinte's life story figured in two US television series based on the book: the original 1977 TV miniseries Roots,[2] and a 2016 remake of the same name.

As the years passed, Kunta, now owned by John's brother Dr. William Waller, resigned himself to his fate and became more open and sociable with his fellow slaves, while never forgetting his identity and origin.

Kunta married an enslaved woman named Bell and they had a daughter named Kizzy (Keisa, in Mandinka), which in Kunta's native language means "you sit down" or "you stay put", to protect her from being sold away as Bell had been sold away from her two infant children many decades earlier.

When Kizzy was in her late teens, she was sold away to North Carolina when William Waller discovered that she had written a fake traveling pass for an enslaved young man, Noah, with whom she was in love.

The latter part of the book tells of the generations between Kizzy and Alex Haley, describing their suffering, losses, and eventual triumphs in America.

He described them as a family in which the men were blacksmiths, descended from a marabout named Kairaba Kunta Kinte, originally from Mauritania.

Haley quoted Fofana as telling him: "About the time the king's soldiers came, the eldest of these four sons, Kunta, went away from this village to chop wood and was never seen again.

It was also discovered that elders and griots could not give reliable genealogical lineages before the mid-19th century, with the single apparent exception of Kunta Kinte.

However, despite the inconsistencies with Haley's chronology, academics including historian John Thornton, director of the African American Studies program at Boston University, have noted that a person named Kunta Kinte could have lived in the Gambia in the 1700s and been enslaved.

[13] In the 1987 song "How Ya Like Me Now", an early milestone in his feud with fellow rapper LL Cool J, Kool Moe Dee states that his adversary must bow down to him or suffer Kunta Kinte's punishment: "I'm gonna ask him, 'Who's the best?'

"[14] The 1988 comedy film Coming to America jokingly references Kunta Kinte, in an homage to Roots (John Amos, who played a supporting role in Coming to America as the father of the protagonist's love interest, played the adult version of Kunta Kinte in the 1977 miniseries).