This saga of one man's twelve-year search for his ancestral origin [Roots] owes its success chiefly to white American guilt and Afro-American consciousness…. The Newsweek critique that Roots 'will reach millions of people and alter the way we see ourselves' is one certainly not to be applied to black Africans, who will question the sanity of any man who feels that his ancestral origins are of such significance as to warrant a twelve-year and half-a-million mile search. The inevitable reaction of any such African (I am one) to the resulting book would be … so what?…

This book is sad in a way—from the view that it meant so much to Mr. Haley to embark on this search to find an identity for himself. For this reason only am I happy that he was rewarded with the acclaim and commercial success that the book fetched him. Apart from...