Roots

Originally posted on my intranet site !

How would it feel to have no knowledge of your ancestry? How would it feel to be uprooted from where you live, forcefully, and to be shipped like cattle to a different continent? How would it feel to be forced to forgo your land, your religion, your culture, in short, your life, only to be beaten up and treated as a slave? We probably would never know. We live in, what is called a ‘Cultured Society’ now.

During one of my customer visits, I had the opportunity of befriending a coloured gentleman, who was telling me how lucky we Indians were. He said - ‘You Indians are lucky ! You know who your parents are, who their parents are, where they were from etc. Look at us, my ancestors were probably from some country in Africa and one of them must have worked in a plantation in the South (of US). We have no roots ! We do not know our roots !’.
I had read some books about the American Civil War, the abolition of slavery etc and could understand his thoughts. It gave me a new perspective and a new sense of appreciation of what we are etc.

Supposing one such person (like my friend), could trace back his roots - how wonderful that would be !! How interesting that sounds !

Alex Haley did just that and the result was a book called ‘Roots’ !! Alex Haley managed to trace back his ancestry to up to 7 generations to a village in Gambia in Africa, and that by itself is a great feat !! Haley obviously encountered a lot of gaps in the history, which he has filled up with his imagination.

The book starts with the life of Kunta Kinte, a young native of a village in Gambia. The initial chapters are devoted to the description of Kunta’s simple life in the village, the innocence of his youth, the culture in which he is brought up etc. Life is well, till Kunta is abducted, chained and sent aboard a ship to America. The book then traces Kunta’s life in America, and the lives of the next 6 generations.

Like a lot of popular books, this one too was supposedly mired in controversies. Irrespective of what the critics say, one has to admit that it is a very well-written book and makes for excellent reading.

If you have read ‘Gone with the Wind’ by Margaret Mitchell, you may have noticed that the author was trying to convey that black slavery was not as bad as it is projected to be and that blacks were like children and wanted to be protected by whites. Well, reading this book, you will realize the atrocity of slavery and how inhuman the act of uprooting a person from his homeland is !

My dear librarian recommends some good books once in a while, if I pester him well enough and long enough to suggest something other than murder mysteries and novels on war and espionage. So my special thanks to him for recommending this book. I read this more than 2 years back, but still think it is one of the best books that I have ever read.