Alex Haley may have fabricated much of Roots, writes Pascoe Sawyers, but the novel told a larger truth
Like many first generation black Britons, I didnt even know I had African heritage until the mid-1970s. Before then, apart from the superficialities of skin colour and hair texture, it had never occurred to me that I was different from my many white schoolmates. We shared the same tastes, interests and culture, and I doubt if Id have recognised racism even if it came and slapped me in the face. Which, metaphorically speaking, it probably did on several occasions.
Then I found out that there was a whole dimension of me that I knew nothing about. That was in 1977, when the BBC screened the TV dramatisation of Alex Haleys Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller, Roots. The book, which was published a year earlier, could have been subtitled Slavery for Beginners. It was the story of how Haley traced his ancestry through six generations to a 16- year-old youth called Kunta Kinte, who was stolen from his village in the Gambia, shackled in chains, taken to America and forced into slavery.
Before Roots, I had thought of Africans as almost alien, and certainly inferior, creatures which is not surprising given I was raised on Tarzan books, comics and films. Finding out I was one of them, and seeing the truth about how I came to be born here and not in Africa, was one of the most painful experiences of my life. Could this really have happened? Why didnt my parents tell me about it? Did all my white friends and white teachers know about it?
Roots seemed to have an equally devastating effect on the white kids at my school. Apart from a few budding bigots, they were humbled and embarrassed at seeing for the first time the evil committed by their ancestors against mine. But that didnt stop lots of them taking beatings in the playground every Monday after another Sunday night instalment of the serial. Emotions and racial tension were high for a while after the screening.
The book put the issue of the transatlantic slave trade on the mainstream agenda for the first time in modern history, and is widely acknowledged as one of this centurys most significant literary works. A record 130-million people tuned into the TV serial in America, and it attracted huge audiences here. So what made it more important than any other book of family history?
When Haley explained how he sold the idea of the book to his publishers, he said: I told them that what I wanted to write was technically the story of my own family, but broadly it would really be the saga of a people. Every black person in America ancestrally traces back to an African born and reared in a village, who was captured, put into a ship, brought across the ocean, sold and passed through successions of plantations.
Haley fulfilled his objective. The book was also responsible for a new trend for black and white people lineage tracing. With this in mind I joined a group of 100 black people from Britain, including my father and six-year-old son, for our first trip to Africa. We arrived in the Gambia for the week-long Roots Homecoming Festival. The festival, part of a cultural-tourism initiative by the Gambian government, was organised to celebrate the 21st anniversary of the books publication.
The Gambia is one of the smallest and most hospitable countries in Africa. Located on a narrow strip of land on the West African coast, it has a population of just over one million, made up of eight distinct but harmonious ethnic groups. Like most other parts of the continent, its people are poor and its infrastructure underdeveloped. But it has a well-developed tourism industry, and an unenviable reputation as the place where mature European women go to buy sex with young African men.
But most of us who journeyed to the Gambia, our minds dotted with images of Kunta Kinte, Kizzy and Chicken George, did not see ourselves as tourists taking in the sea air on bone-white beaches; we were more like orphaned sons and daughters returning to a motherland we had lost. Some of us, myself included, secretly harboured ambitions of finding some facts about our African lineage.
Unfortunately, we did not have the kind of basic information that had encouraged Alex Haley to trek back along his family tree. He was inspired by stories he had heard as a boy, when he spent many a summer evening sitting on the porch of his family home in Americas Deep South listening to his grandmother and great aunts conversing about their family heritage.
They invariably talked about the same thing: the old African slave, Kunta Kinte. After one too many unsuccessful attempts at escaping, Kunta was given the option of being castrated or having his foot amputated. The loss of his foot put a stop to Kuntas efforts to escape, but he continued his fight for a mental and spiritual freedom by passing on information about his language and culture to his only child, Kizzy. Kizzy in turn passed the information on to her child, Chicken George, telling him that the old African was his father as part of her efforts to cover up the fact that he was the product of the slave masters frequent raping of her.
Through Kuntas determination to keep the story of his lineage alive, Haley had enough clues to lead him in the right direction when he decided to dig for his roots.
Ive absolutely no idea which part of West Africa my ancestors were taken from, but if I had a choice, I think it would have been the Gambia. An increasing number of critics believe that Haley chose it as his ancestral homeland long before he embarked on the 12-year search for his familys origins. His detractors claim there is a vast body of evidence, including a virtual confession before his death from a heart attack in 1992, that Haley fabricated huge chunks of the books contents. In 1978 Haley paid $650 000 in an out-of-court settlement to the author Harold Courlander, who claimed that Haley had plagiarised up to 80 passages from his 1967 novel, The African.
It was almost as if Haley was anticipating the criticism that would eventually come when he wrote in the books final chapter: To the best of my knowledge every lineage within Roots is from either my African or American families carefully preserved oral history, much of which I have been able conventionally to corroborate with documents.
In 1981 genealogists Gary and Elizabeth Mills described him as a typical amateur genealogist, and attacked his over- dependence on the oral history passed down by members of his family and the griots (oral historians) he had met in the Gambia, in preference to the documented historical record. For example, in a study of archived records from the relevant area and dates, they found that Toby (the slave-name given to Kunta Kinte), died eight years before he was supposed to have had his daughter, Kizzy, in 1790.
Yet the most savage and comprehensive attack came from journalist Philip Nobile soon after Haleys death. Nobile described Roots as the modern eras most successful literary hoax, claiming that Haley invented 200 years of family history.
Damning as these criticisms might appear to be, for most of us on the trip, the scepticism about Roots was not a significant issue. For me, the Roots Homecoming Festival too became a bit of an irrelevance. I was far more interested in going out and meeting the people, mainly men: taxi drivers, hotel staff, market stall holders and bumsters, the guys who hang out at the beach and on street corners selling everything from trinkets to cannabis.
Lamin ran a craft stall on the beach front near our hotel. Like most of the guys I met, he was a practising Muslim. That aside, we had a lot in common early 30s, married with two children. In a heavy discussion about the way forward for Africa, he suddenly mentioned that he regularly slept with European tourists, many of them twice his age, as a way of earning extra cash. I was so stunned that I had to break off our conversation.
On reflection, I can understand why he does it, but I believe Kunta Kinte would be turning in his grave if he could see his direct descendants willingly selling themselves to Europeans in this way.
I had expected the trip to James Island to be the most stirring part of our time in the Gambia. As the place where the defiant Kunta Kinte was finally disconnected from African soil, the island has huge symbolic significance. It stands marooned on the awesome River Gambia, a short boat trip from the mainland. Its remoteness must have seemed a godsend to slave-traders. Only the strongest swimmer could have survived any attempt to escape.
Our tour guide pointed to the only part of the islands fort that was intact. There, he said, is where the slave-traders housed the most rebellious of their captives, up to 20 men at a time in that space. I stepped down the five or six narrow steps into the dungeon to a truly eerie experience. The interior measured about 1,3m square and, though the heat of the sun pounded down outside, in the dungeons I shivered with cold.
Later, we took the boat back down river to Juffureh, the little village from which Kinte was taken. It seemed that because we were the official festival party, the entire population of about 1 000 people was coaxed into welcoming us. It reminded me of Haleys description of his first visit to the village. Word had got out about who he was and to his surprise he was meet by a crowd of the blackest people I had ever seen, chanting what they thought was his name, Mr Kinte, Mr Kinte
The experience brought Haley to tears, but 20 years on, the crowds welcome made us feel uncomfortable. Its
funny, Haley had come here in search of his African identity, but in so doing, he seems to have left a residue of his Western mentality which has changed, almost contaminated, these riverside village people.
The most obvious attraction for any visitor to Juffureh is meeting Binta Kinte. Well over 80 years old, she is Kuntas oldest surviving relative. She looked almost regal, wrapped in her Muslim shawl as we encircled her. Binta sat silent, with occasional hints of amusement and boredom on her face, as a guide told how he, personally, had helped Haley to find his roots.
Like many others in the Gambia, Binta Kinte makes her living from tourists. She was happy to be photographed with almost every single member of our party without exchanging a word with any of us. Some said it was because she couldnt speak English, but I wasnt convinced. We made our obligatory donations to the bowl on the table in front of her, but somehow it didnt feel right that this dignified old lady should be reduced to the status of a smiling, nodding, tourist attraction.
In the process of telling his story, Haley portrays Africa as a virtual idyll, consisting of lush green landscapes, well- organised societies and a people living in harmony guided by ancient traditions, values and laws. Even though a lot of that has now fallen apart, Haleys description helps to remind us that African people had a great and glorious past before they were enslaved by Arabs and then Europeans. It has inspired thousands of people from all over the African diaspora to see Africa as their motherland and to reaffirm their African identity.
And by citing Haley as a fraud, his mostly white critics seem to imply that slavery had a lesser impact on the African race than we were led to believe. A recent BBC documentary, The Roots of Alex Haley, claims to show that Haley totally fabricated the existence of Kunta Kinte.
But while most black people would accept that Roots may not have been a totally faithful record of Haleys family history, it still represents the historical record of one of the major crimes against humanity, the story of how we were stolen from our homes, taken to the West and stripped of our names, languages, religion and culture. As far as we are concern- ed, Roots is an unchallengeable testament of symbolic truth.