During the evening of 8 April 1977, the first episode of a television mini-series called Roots, originally made for the American ABC Network, was screened in the UK by the BBC. In the above account, British actor and playwright Kwame Kwei-Armah offers a personal narrative reflecting on the shared and monumental impact which the televisual reworking of Alex Haley's 1976 novel Roots: The Saga of an American Family had on the emerging political and historical consciousness of a generation of young people living in the UK. These were young people whose ancestors had taken a multigenerational journey from West Africa to the UK via the terrors of the Middle Passage and the grinding cruelties of chattel slavery on the plantations of the ‘New World’, specifically in this instance those of the British-held islands of the Caribbean.

The fact that Roots had been constructed as a history engrained within the antebellum South of the US creates a slight but significant moment of slippage in the perceptions of the UK-based audience. For Haley, its relationship to a specifically US history is key. It is not only inbuilt in the book's subtitle ‘Saga of an American Family’, but was also, through its year of publication, 1976, inextricably linked to bicentennial celebrations of US nationhood. Haley himself was to claim on the book's dedication page that ‘just by chance it is being published on the Bicentennial year of the United States, So I dedicate Roots as a birthday offering to my country within which Roots happened’. It also becomes necessary, I would argue, to locate Roots within the politics of the African American ‘Civil Rights’ struggle as it continued to evolve through the 1960s and into the mid-1970s, and in which the concept of Black American genealogy as deeply embedded within the national narrative of the United States became an essential element in calls for full social, economic and political enfranchisement.