An Elusive Past

...The book's central flaw is that while it portrays in almost anthropological detail Kinte's Mandingo (or Malinke or Mandinka) childhood, and the cultural clash of his initiation into the life of a slave, the wholly American author's persona rather than that of the fictionalized character emerges from the printed page...

...For instance, the village's main crop is rice, which was not introduced until this century and only became Gambia's staple diet after World War II...

...A major one occurs in the book's main episode—the story of Kintc's capture...

...Written mostly in slave dialect, it is crammed with raw violence and makes valid demands on the tearducts of the dourest reader...

...Adults in the village know their ages—an unlikely situation even today...

...There are other minor incongruities, such as eating kola nuts from "Nigeria" (a name thought up by Lady Lugard in 1900), clothes on "pegs," girls wearing "dresses," and someone talking of a caravan of "12,000 camels...

...But despite three or four extended visits to Juffure and other parts of Africa, Haley is necessarily still an outsider...

...What Islamic taboo had been broken, what ancestor left unappeased, for his unavoidable sanction to have been imposed...

...Indeed, they had no concept of "Africa" (Haley's characters use the term...

...Although resentment at the human instruments of his bondage would be natural enough for Kinte, an illiterate Muslim steeped in animism, the predominant concern would be Why...

...The American passages—by far the best and most convincing—are on a par with Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, fully worthy of the praise lavished by reviewers...

...Today, when large families are often uneconomical, Binta might well protest...

...no one can expect a foreigner to emulate a Chinua Achebe or a Flora Nwapa —to live within the extrasensorial psyche of the West African, in constant communication with his supernatural ancestors...

...About a quarter of the narrative takes place in West Africa, another half deals with Kunta Kinte in America, and the final part follows his descendants into modern times...

...Yet Haley's people speak of "The Gambia," the name given to the Kamby River colony created more than a century later, and "Senegal," the French name for the Sunuga River that first became the title of an imperial claim at the Berlin Conference of 1884...

...Haley's fictionalized ancestor angrily also thinks of his captors as "traitors...

...Elders mention Benin (1,200 miles away), pygmies and Batutsi (who live as far from Juffure as New York is from San Francisco), and Zimbabwe (a vanished kingdom still further south...

...Kinte is weaned at 13 months—conceivable now, when every Mauritanian storekeeper in Gambia sells powdered milk and formula, but unthinkable in traditional West Africa before the age of three or later...

...Yet for all Haley's undeniable achievement and painstaking research, implying a claim to authenticity, the key historical portions are marred by serious factual errors...

...Kinte's grandfather had been a Mauritanian—a member of a Muslim Berber people with a Negroid strain, whose oral history probably contained (as Haley depicts) memories of old Mali and other medieval warlord regimes of the western Sudan...

...zan, while seamen armed with staves stalk through the long grass, ready to pounce on isolated tribesmen...

...Kinte's immediate, hysterically sustained reaction to the tragedy of capture is the hindsight rage of today's American...

...In Roots, the women of Juffure kiss children...

...Nor did the question of treason arise, since slaveraiders only captured foreigners, not members of their own clans...

...Certainly it should not detract from the author's amazing work in tracing his family tree to a remote hamlet thousands of miles away...

...Roots is an earthy adventure, and the promised TV series should be considerably more realistic than, say, Sounder, featuring oh-so-nicely-behaved Louisiana sharecroppers of the 1930s...

...He conveys the local color well and with intelligent sympathy...

...After a decade of research in Africa, Europe and the United States he was able to piece together his family tree...

...Slaves were the region's most lucrative export, and the middlemen—the African beach traders who reaped the greatest profit in this commerce?bought from African captors and sold to the ships...

...The result, although represented as non-fiction, is a monumental novel, a Forsyte Saga of a part-African, part-Irish, part-Cherokee family...

...The Juffure of the 1750s is portrayed almost as it appears today...

...The people of his village, Juffure, did not see all "Africans" as brothers...

...An African analysis of an American novel, particularly one as good as Roots, is perhaps in some ways superfluous...

...Such an idea never could have occurred to Kinte...

...Like characters from Tar...

...in traditional Africa it would be revolting to use the mouth for anything but eating, drinking and talking...

...Juffure was a pastoral upriver farming hamlet, connected, as Haley notes, only to the few close-by settlements that shared a common language...

...When Kinte cries out on the slave ship that he will never again fail to face Mecca five times a day, Haley comes closest to letting his creation be Mandingo, not American...

...Its oral traditions were linked to the Sahel in the North, whence came its Islam...

...Most slaves went to their fates with resignation, and not surprisingly: Fear, not anger, is the first reaction...

...But much of the gratuitous cruelty in Roots, directed against a cargo whose value depended on its condition, belies the logic of commerce and the ample memoirs of the trade...

...But what Haley shows is that —although less has changed in Juffure over 200 years than in Tennessee, where Allah ordained Kinte's tree should sprout—the roots alone can be uncovered...

...Only when Juffure has become a distant childhood memory, and Kinte is acculturated into slave America, does the character become arrestingly true...

...There is talk, too, of "Senegalese" and of "Northern Guinea...

...Kinte's mother, Binta, fears her husband, Omoro, will take a second wife...

...author, "Black Africa" From grandmotherly talk on a Tennessee porch, Alex Haley, who assisted Malcolm X in writing his autobiography, grew up with vague knowledge of an African slave ancestor called Kinte...

...In 1760—and as recently as 1960—the new mate would mean Binta's promotion to senior wife, to less work and more respect...

...Historians will not quarrel with Haley's graphic description of the foul conditions aboard a slave ship...

...the seed cannot be recaptured...

...The writer admirably describes the gruff discipline and reassuring certainties of life in a traditional West African village...

...She might even object for feminist reasons...

...Numerical systems did not exist, decimalized or otherwise, and in Mandingo one would probably still describe a caravan by saying, "look ahead, no finish, look back, no finish...

...Allowing outsiders to participate in slavehunting was as unthinkable in 18th-century West Africa as permitting them to harvest their own peppers or shoot ivory...