Uprooting Kunta Kinte: On the Perils of Relying on Encyclopedic Informants

In the late summer of 1976, amid considerable publicity, Doubleday and Company published Alex Haley's Roots: The Saga of an American Family. Almost overnight author and book gained considerable fame. Americans and soon others accepted the essential validity of the story of Haley's maternal ancestors, which reached back to the Gambia River and to the eighteenth century. Within a few months of its publication Roots had been serialized for televison. Before a year had passed Doubleday had sold over 1,500,000 copies of the book, it had gone into translation in several dozen languages, and Haley had been awarded a special Pulitzer Prize, neither for fiction nor non-fiction, but for something in between felicitously denominated “faction.” The magnitude of Roots' impact makes criticism of the basis of its argument somewhat indivious but perhpas all the more necessary.One aspect of Roots that added considerably to its popularity was the apparent authenticity of the genealogy which Haley used to identify his African ancestor. Haley claimed that, largely through oral history, he had proved the existence of his ancestor, one Kunta Kinte, who had been kidnapped into slavery over two hundred years ago and brought directly to the British North American colonies. A decade of diligent searching had made it possible for Haley to piece together the basic outlines of his ancestry. To nearly everyone who read the book or heard the story of his quest, such success in locating his roots in Africa, after a century of slavery and another of difficult freedom, seemed to justify the endeavor.