Roots is one of those cultural touchstones that I’ve heard referenced all my life, but like most Brits I had never read the book or watched the seminal TV series that closely followed its publication. Then I watched the 2016 remake mini series – largely because I knew the cast included Regé-Jean Page – and immediately added the book to my wishlist.

It’s a big book – almost 700 pages of small print. So it took me a while to pick it up and a while to read it. I also found it a slow read to begin with, but I’m glad I persisted.

For those not familiar with Roots by Alex Haley, it’s the saga of a single family. It begins with the birth of Kunte Kinte in a small village in 18th century Gambia. We follow his life closely until at age 16 he is kidnapped into slavery and transported to the southern US. The book then follows generations of his descendants, beginning with those enslaved like him, and later on, free African-Americans up to Haley himself.

It’s this last detail that was both revolutionary and controversial. The idea that it was possible for the living American descendants of enslaved Africans to trace their family history, that their connection to their roots had not necessarily been severed – no-one had demonstrated that before. Roots inspired a massive increased interest in genealogy, particularly among African-Americans. Now, there is some question as to whether Haley got his research right – many people have picked holes in it both at the time of publication and ever since. I really don’t care if he was actually related to people with these exact names and biographies. I think the concept, and the huge cultural impact of centring these lives and experiences outweighs all that.

A significant portion of the book – almost 150 pages – is devoted to the childhood and adolescence of Kunte Kinte in Gambia. Which is longer than I expected, and I did struggle a bit to remain interested in the minutiae of how boys in the village of Juffure were trained first to tend goats and then later to hunt and keep guard. But these are after all the “roots” that the rest of the book harks back to. It’s here that Haley establishes that Kunte attended school and studied the Quran. He could read, write and speak Arabic as well as speaking Mandinka. He had plans, hopes and dreams – including to travel.

On arrival in Virginia, both Kunte’s enslaver and fellow enslaved people treat him as stupid because he does not speak a language they recognise. They assume him to be illiterate and are confused by his not drinking alcohol or eating pork. Haley does a decent job of describing Kunte’s frustration at not understanding much of what is happening on top of what’s happening being awful.

“He was 34 rains old! What in the name of Allah had happened to his life? He had been in the white man’s land as long as he had lived in Juffure. Was he still an African…? Was he even a man? He was the same age as his father when he had seen him last, yet he had no sons of his own, no wife, no family, no village, no people, no homeland, almost no past at all that seemed real to him anymore – and no future he could see. It was as if the Gambia had been a dream he’d had once long ago.”

It’s over 400 pages before the narrative switches from Kunte to follow his child Kizzy. Clearly none of his descendants get quite so much detail. Time speeds up gradually so that near the end, 30 pages cover three generations, before ploughing into the final chapter about Haley himself doing the research that led to this book.

Should Haley have included that last part? Considering the unpicking that has been done of his research, was that asking for trouble? Did he truly think he had been thorough and there was no risk? Would a white author, or a narrative less revealing about the horrors of slavery, have received the same level of scrutiny? I strongly suspect not.

It’s hard to read the details of physical violence, sickness, injury, sexual assault and rape but I do think they were necessary to really depict this story. And they are dialled down considerably in the last third of the book. In fact, one thing I found a little odd is that after the first enslaver of Kunte Kinte in the US, who is truly terrible in every way, the ensuing enslavers of him and his descendants aren’t depicted as completely awful people. You could almost say Haley’s depiction is sympathetic.

But even the family’s supposedly “better” enslavers still treat them as somewhere between belongings and pets. They break promises, split up families, control their lives with threats of violence and death. So I guess Haley is making the point that there is no “nice” way to own human beings. He also shows multiple enslaved characters attempting to escape and failing, leading to horrific punishment. Which I think is an important counter to the common accusation that slavery couldn’t have been that bad or there would have been more slave revolts.

Haley isn’t the most elegant writer. He uses the n word a lot, like a dozen times per page. And I don’t love that the story includes plagiarism (acknowledged by Haley following a court case) – mostly in the section about the middle passage. Of course, Haley’s attempt to recreate this experience by asking to spend part of his own ocean crossing on a wooden bench in the hold of the ship couldn’t come anywhere close to a true facsimile, so it makes sense that he read all the accounts that he could get hold of. As I understand it, Haley’s was the first big successful book to describe that part of the whole awful business of transatlantic slavery.

Which speaks to my main takeaway. This is a story that needed to be told and its huge cultural impact shows it was important to a lot of people that it got told.

First published in 1976 by Doubleday.

Source: present from my Mum.