Slave trade is real history but Haley’s book a piece of imaginative fiction
News article filed by BNP news team
The BBC has been indulging in a bit of “whitey” bashing again today, focusing on the marking of the slave trade which was abolished throughout the British Empire and reminding listeners to Radio 4 that the evil white Europeans and white Americans are collectively guilty of enslaving the poor down-trodden Africans. The indisputable facts that various African tribes were enslaving one another centuries before a single western European set foot in West Africa and that slavery continues today without the involvement of a single white European were not aired in the programme “Roots” broadcast earlier today.
Another fact that wasn’t mentioned was that the book “Roots”, on which the 1977 tv series was based, was penned by one of the biggest fraudsters in American literary history and the work itself less of a milestone in raising awareness of Black American history than a plagiarised piece of fiction.
Alex Haley claimed his work was based on twelve years of research spanning two continents and over two hundred years of history. The reality was less of a heroic piece of study and more of an act of deceit which duped millions in the UK and America.Financial settlement
Haley himself was forced to acknowledge, a large section of his book – including the plot, main character and scores of whole passages – was lifted from “The African,” a 1967 novel by white author Harold (Hal) Courlander. Haley was forced to pay the author $650,000 in damages in an out-of-court settlement after a plagiarism trial in 1978, that’s about $2million in today’s money.
Plagiarism isn’t the only issue which blights the success of the television series. Thanks to investigative American journalist Philip Nobile Haley’s alleged history of the book was a near-total invention. Nobile conducted a study of Haley’s private papers shortly before they were auctioned off.
“Virtually every genealogical claim in Haley’s story was false,” Nobile has written. None of Haley’s early writing contains any reference to his mythic ancestor, “the African” named Kunta Kinte. Indeed, Haley’s later notes give his family name as “Kante,” not “Kinte.”
Threats
And a long-suppressed tape of the famous session in which Haley ” found” Kunta Kinte through the recitation of an African “griot” proves that, as a BBC producer James Kent noted, “the villagers [were threatened by members of Haley’s party. These turn out to be senior (Gambian) government officials desperate to ensure that things go smoothly.”
Haley, added Kent, “specifically asks for a story that will fit his predetermined American narrative.”
Historical experts who checked Haley’s genealogical research discovered that, as one put it, “Haley got everything wrong in his pre-Civil War lineage and none of his plantation ancestors existed; 182 pages have no basis in fact.”
The tv series, like the book was presented as factual history, albeit with fictional embellishments. Haley himself claimed that the details came from his family’s oral history and had been corroborated by outside documents.
Viewers were duped- big style but a strange twist in all this – the BBC itself produced a documentary expose of Haley’s work in 1996 (The Roots of Alex Haley, Documentary. Directed by James Kent. BBC Bookmark, 1996) which has been banned by U.S. television networks – yet the very same broadcaster chose to ignore that important fact in today’s programme in a prime example of how the State channel continues to rewrite history in a classical Orwellian 1984 manner.