"Roots", a novel by Alex Haley.

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“Roots”

        

For this assignment I choose to read “Roots”, a novel by Alex Haley. This novel explores six generations of black African Americans. Roots begins with a birth in an African village in 1750, and ends two centuries later at a funeral in Arkansas. And in that time span, an unforgettable cast of men, women, and children come to life, many of them based on the people from Alex Haley's own family tree.

 

When Alex Haley was a boy growing up in Tennessee, his grandmother used to tell him stories about their family, stories that went way back to a man she called "the African" who was taken aboard a slave ship bound for Colonial America. As an adult, Alex Haley spent twelve years searching for documentation that might authenticate what his grandmother had told him. In an astonishing feat of genealogical detective work, he discovered the name of "the African"—Kunta Kinte, as well as the exact location of the village in West Africa from where he was abducted in 1767.

While Haley created certain unknown details of his family history, Roots is definitely based on the facts of his ancestry, and the six generations of people--slaves and freedmen, farmers and lawyers, an architect, teacher--and one acclaimed author--descended from Kunta Kinte. But with this book, Haley did more than recapture the history of his own family. He popularised genealogy for people of all races and colours; and in so doing, wrote one of the most important and beloved books of all time, a true Modern Classic.

“Roots” begins in the small town of Juffree, an African village in 1784. Omoro and Bunta    Kinte have just given birth to their first son, Kunta. Like normal African boys his age, he is taught all the customs of his society and is soon a man; hunting and cooking like the rest of them. While in the forest one fatal day, he is captured by the Americans and is beaten and bashed, nearly to death, before him and dozens of other abducted African men and women are taken aboard a ship bound for the America’s.  

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        Taken to the slave market in southern America, he is bought by a ‘massa’ Walker and ordered to work in the fields. Kunta Kinte is no longer a free African man but a ‘nigger’, a black American slave. After trying to run away 4 times with no success, he slowly starts to accept the life that he has. Kunta is given the name of ‘Toby” and is given the job of carriage driver for the ‘massa’ and his ‘missus’. Reminded by the fact that he soon must marry, he asks Bell, the cook on the southern plantation to ‘jump ...

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