SOURCE: West, Richard. “Roots and the Sunday Times.” Spectator 238, no. 7764 (23 April 1977): 19-20.

In the following essay, West questions the veracity of Haley's ancestral and historical claims in Roots.

As long ago as the mid-eighteenth century, a Negro slave from North America who had been given his freedom by a considerate white man, returned to his home by the Gambia river, afterwards writing a book about his experiences. Until well into the nineteenth century, some of those freed slaves who went to the settlements at Sierra Leone and Liberia were able to find their relations or at least their kinsmen. Perhaps the majority knew to which tribe or language group they belonged. For instance the famous West Indian scholar, Edward Blyden, was conscious and proud of his Ibo ancestry, although he preferred to live in Liberia.

By the present century, most of the descendants of African slaves in the...