I'm talking about Roots. Assisted by Alex Haley. Doubleday (1976).

The name of Alex Haley may not be mentioned by many of you, but by Kunta Kinterena almost all of you, for sure. Now 34 years ago, Roots was published, one of the most successful novels in the history of literature from the point of view of sales. In it, Alex Haley (1921-1992) reports of an African captured in the 18th century: Assisted by Kunta Kinte. Kinte was taken as a slave to the United States, where he had his daughter, that daughter had his son, that son... In the seventh generation, the author of the novel himself was born.

Kint always claimed his African origin and rejected the name given by the Americans, Toby. She told her daughter about her homeland, her daughter about her son, her son... until the story of her African ancestor came to Alex Haley. In the last pages, Haley explains how he curated the novel, first asking his elder relatives, then going to Africa, discovering Kinter’s hometown, receiving from the mouth of a griot there – a man who preserves the memory of the people – what his crushing was...

The book was a big boom. But soon, Haley was accused of plagiarism by writer Harold Courlander, who claimed that 81 passages by Roots were copied from the African novel. The court gave the plaintiff a reason, and a small fraction of the dollars Haley earned from the book, namely 650,000, went to Courlander's patrician. The genealogist Elizabeth Show's criticism of Roots is much less well-known than

Kunta Kint's: as she pointed out after countless inquiries, it is impossible for this slave named Toby to be Haley's ancestor; the dates do not coincide. It is even suspected that the African griot who told Haley the story of Kunta Kinter did not receive any “pressure” to say the same. Are Haley's roots fictional?