Roots: The Saga of an American Family Themes
Contrasting Regions: Africa and America
For Kunta Kinte, being kidnapped and brought from Africa to America isn't just incredibly traumatic—it's incredibly confusing. In this strange land of the toubob, he is confronted with a culture...
Family
Roots is all about the fam, ma'am. Born into a highly regarded family in the Mandinka tribe, Kunta Kinte grows up with a great sense of pride about his ancestral legacy, not to mention a great deal...
Women and Femininity
Although Roots investigates a wide variety of topics, from the historical and economic roots of American slavery to the details of the aftermath of the Civil War, the novel keeps coming back to iss...
Power
The institution of slavery is all about power. It's about the power to control the lives of other human beings. It's about the power to makes oneself rich from the sweat of another person's brow. I...
Suffering
For most people whose lives were destroyed by the American slave trade, suffering was just a part of life. You suffered through bone-breaking hours of heavy labor. You suffered through the violent...
Memory and the Past
When we look at Roots outside of its historical context, we can see that it's nothing if not an ode to the importance of connecting to one's past. What's more, it seems to argue that without our pa...
Religion
We see religion take a bunch of different forms over the course of Roots. We see the traditional spiritual beliefs of Kunta Kinte's tribe, the Mandinka. We see Kunta's own devout Islam, which is hi...
Community
Sorry, NBC's Community fans—we're talking about the community in Roots here. Still, stick around—because there's more community in this novel than in most colleges. When Kunta Kinte's kidnapped...
Slavery
Roots tackles the topic of slavery with incredible nuance. First, author Alex Haley examines how slavery traditionally worked outside of America, noting the many ways that slaves were still granted...
Race
If you want one book to explain the way that race functions in America, you could do a lot worse than Roots. There's a reason this thing's so famous, after all. Beginning in Africa, where a young K...