Historical Accuracy of the Movie Roots

How accurate is the movie roots? The movie Roots is a great historical movie. The representation of slavery and abolition in the movie is not only a highly emotive and potentially divisive subject it also provides a means of accessing the past in a manner which is empowering and rewarding. Representations of historical contexts on film and television have often proven to be very important in the creation of public memory. Indeed, these cultural modes of expression are often critically considered to be amongst the main source of people's perceptions and memories of the historic past. The movie roots were very accurate. Some of the things that were accurate in the movies were; black men were being kidnapped and carried away to be sold, slaves were punished by being harmed, and slave owners fornicated with their slaves. Roots enhanced some incidents for dramatic effects but that the essentials were based on historical reality. The movie confirmed most of what we know of slavery in that era.

In the beginning of the movie Haley described man who saw white men and where token by them and carried away. This was a very accurate historical because white men did kidnap slaves during that time period to sell them. Europeans purchased from different tribes such as African tribes who captured slaves themselves. European traders captured some Africans in raids along the coast, but bought most of them from local African or African-European dealers. The Europeans also played a role in kidnapping of Africans. In many cases the European would instigate wars between African tribes so they would sell each other into slavery. And while African fighting each other, Europeans would sometimes target weak tribes to kidnap. Also some of the European Christian missionaries tricked some of the African chiefs into selling their prisoners of war and criminals. Europeans began exploring and establishing trading posts on the Atlantic west coast of Africa. The first major group of European traders in West Africa was the Portuguese, followed by the British and the French. In the 16th and 17th centuries, these European colonial powers began to pursue plantation agriculture in their expanding possessions in the New World North, Central, and South America, and the Caribbean islands, across the Atlantic Ocean. As European demand grew for products such as sugar, tobacco, rice, indigo, and cotton, and as more New World lands became available for European use, the need for plantation labor increased as state on http://encarta.