“Contrary to the “myths to live by” created by Alex Haley and others, Africans were by no means the innocents portrayed in Roots, baffled as to why white men were coming in and taking their people away in chains. On the contrary, the region of West Africa from which Kunte Kinte supposedly came was one of the great slave-trading regions of the continent—before, during, and after the white man arrived. It was the Africans who enslaved their fellow Africans, selling some of these slaves to Europeans or to Arabs and keeping others for themselves. Even at the peak of the Atlantic slave trade, Africans retained more slaves for themselves than they sent to the Western Hemisphere.”