even wrote a letter to Alex Haley expressing doubts about Fofana's reliability. On repeated retellings of the story, Fofana changed key details Haley had relied on for his identification. In 1981, Donald R. Wright, a historian of the West African slave trade, reported that elders and griots in The Gambia could not provide detailed information on people living before the mid-19th century, but everyone had heard of Kunta Kinte. Haley had told his story to so many people that his version of his family history had been assimilated into the oral traditions of The Gambia. Haley had created a case of circular reporting, in which people repeated his words back to him.The Roots of Alex Haley. Documentary. Directed by James Kent. BBC Bookmark, 1996. Roots depicted Juffure as a village where people had heard rumors about white men by 1767, but had never met any. In reality, Juffure was two miles from James Island, a major trading outpost established by the Royal Africa Company in 1661. The King of Barra allowed the Company to establish a fort on the island, on the condition none of his subjects could be purchased without his permission. Haley admitted that he had picked the year 1767 as "the time the King's soldiers came" to match his American research. Virginia and North Carolina Historian Gary B. Mills and genealogist Elizabeth Shown Mills, who specialize in black American and southern history, followed Haley's trail in Census records, deed books, and wills. They concluded: Those same plantation records, wills, and censuses cited by Mr. Haley not only fail to document his story, but they contradict each and every pre-Civil War statement of Afro-American lineage in Roots!" (emphasis in the original) The Waller family already owned the slave Toby in 1762, five years before the Lord Ligonier supposedly landed Kunta Kinte in Annapolis. Haley had only searched for references to Toby after 1767, succumbing to confirmation bias. Dr. Waller did not have a cook named Bell or his own plantation, as he was disabled and lived with his brother John. Toby also appears to have died before 1782, eight years before his daughter Kizzy was supposedly born. "Missy" Anne could not have been Kizzy's childhood playmate, as Ann Murray was a grown woman and already married in the relevant timeframe. In fact, there is no record of a Kizzy being owned by any of the Wallers. After the