not only was the book a fraud, but it’s perpetuated a false narrative about slavery for nearly 40 years. as i recall, the protagonist was out in the jungle one day when minding his own business when he was set upon by evil white slave traders from a nearby ship and captured, thus becoming a slave.
that’s an overwhelmingly false narrative. the vast majority of african slaves were sold into slavery by other africans as the result of tribal conflicts, to settle a debt, or captured by north african and arab MUSLIMS raiders from the north. north african and arab MUSLIMS have always been in control of the african slave trade and they still are to this very day!
the notion that somehow only western europeans should feel unique shame for what a small percentage of their ancestors did to africans they purchased from MUSLIMS is baloney. lots of western europeans were pressed into slavery themselves as they traveled the mediterranean, never to taste freedom again. in fact, MUSLIMS were trading slaves in africa for 600-700 years before western europeans first got involved.
but of course this fact was never mentioned in Roots, was it?
***the vast majority of african slaves were sold into slavery by other africans as the result of tribal conflicts***
In the book THE DEFEAT OF JOHN HAWKINS by Rayner Unwin, tells of his slave catching trip to Africa where he made deals with local Chieftans to fill his ships with the enemies of that particular tribe. After capturing a village, a massacre took place in which most were slaughtered by the ATTACKING LOCAL natives. There were still enough left to fill the ships, those they could not take as slaves....WERE EATEN BY THE LOCAL TRIBES.
The tribe that was attacked was not from the area, as something deep within Africa had caused these natives to flee toward the coast, invading the local Chieftan’s tribal lands.
Very few slaves sold across the Atlantic were sold to Europeans by Muslims. The Muslims were well inland, barred from the coast by rich, powerful pagan slave-trading kingdoms.
Probably a good many of the slaves these kingdoms sold to whites were originally enslaved by Muslims and sold to the pagan kings by them. But there was little direct contact between Europeans and Muslims in the slave trade.