Kunta Kinte is the central character of the novel, Roots: The Saga of an American Family by Alex Haley, an of the television mini-series Roots, based on the book. Roots is referred to by Haley as faction - a mixture of both fact and fiction, and much of the book's material is borrowed from a book called The African by Harold Courlander. Kunta Kinte was a Mandinka. Kunta was captured and brought as a slave to Annapolis, Maryland, and later sold to a plantation owner in Spotsylvania County, Virginia near the present-day rural community of Partlow.