Haley and Courlander settled out of court, and Haley acknowledged that he did use passages from The African in Roots. Harold Courlander claimed that large portions of Roots were drawn from his book The African. It is now often described as a novel.Īlso dogging Haley were two charges that the book was plagiarized. Haley described it as “faction.” But on the heels of the charges about the book’s historical inaccuracies, the publisher moved the book to its fiction category. When the book was originally published in 1976, it had been promoted as nonfiction and flew to the top of The New York Times bestseller list for nonfiction. The whole thing was much too neat, and Haley simply didn’t have the conclusive evidence to back it up. The Gambian griot may have told Haley wanted he wanted to hear, and the other links in Haley’s genealogical chain were suspect. Since the release of the book and the miniseries, a series of scholars just as painstakingly debunked Haley’s story.
Those documents, along with the myriad textural details of what were contemporary indigenous lifestyles, cultural history, and such that give Roots flesh have come from years of intensive research in fifty-odd libraries, archives, and other repositories on three continents.Īs it turns out, however, this amazing story is not actually true. To the best of my knowledge and of my effort, every lineage statement 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. Based on the griot’s revelations about Kunta Kinte and on the many tales passed down through Haley’s family, based on careful searches of slave records and court documents, Haley painstakingly pieced together the centuries-long tale of multiple generations of his African and African American forebears. And there, in a tiny country known as The Gambia, a griot – part storyteller, part genealogist, part priest – told of the capture of Haley’s great-great-great-great-grandfather Kunta Kinte. After years of genealogical sleuthing, he made his way back to the African village of his ancestors. The story Haley recounted in Roots was nothing short of miraculous. Who can forget Kunta Kinte, his daughter Kizzy, or her son Chicken George?
The concluding episode still ranks as having the third largest audience in television history. I was there, front row, center, for every episode. It was broadcast eight consecutive nights, and like countless other viewers, I was glued to the TV set every night. In January 1977 when I was sixteen, I joined 130 million Americans to watch the television miniseries based on Alex Haley’s book Roots: The Saga of an American Family.
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