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This is honestly a fantastically complex question - one that it's very difficult to answer in a straight-forward way. For that reason, I have to offer you a few caveats before I can begin. The first and most important is that this is not really a question that it is possible to answer in a very definitive way; there aren't many historians writing about the historical accuracy of Roots in the same way there are scholars debating whether or not American racial slavery was an early form of capitalism, for example. The best I can do is offer you my own assessment of Roots as a historian, and try to help you understand how my take compares with others who have written about it. The second key thing I need to stress is that I haven't seen the new miniseries; it did not air in my country at the time of its epic debut in the United States and so I know of it only second-hand (though I have seen the original 1977 TV series). Instead, I'll be talking about the book - Roots: The Saga of An American Family by Alex Haley - on which the miniseries was based, because in order to address the question you really need to deal with the book. The scenes and characters I talk about should be familiar to everyone, so you should be able to follow if you haven't read the novel, but their particular framing may differ in the new TV show.

For the benefit of all readers, I'd like to start with a brief explanation of how Haley's book came to be and was received. When Roots was first released, it was an instant and Pullitzer-prize winning phenomenon in the United States - it shifted millions of hardbacks within months of publication and the mini-series was watched by an estimated 90million people during its first run. It was nothing short of explosive. Unusually to our ears today, it was published neither as fiction nor non-fiction but as so-called 'faction'. Haley claimed that the book was semi-fictional in the sense that the intimate details of scenes in the lives of his characters - dialogue, movement, thoughts - were imagined, but the people themselves and the key events that shaped them were all based on rigorous genealogical research (tracing his family back to their most recent West African ancestor, Kunta Kinte, and his birth in 1750) and historical research about the experience of slavery. This 'based on a true story' aspect of the book was an enormous factor in helping the novel surge to such immediate and instant popularity.

Almost from the outset though, critics in the historical and literary communities started to hit out at Alex Haley for what they claimed were errors in the text. His gentler critics accused him of historical ignorance and getting some details wrong; his harsher ones alleged that the entire novel was based on fraudulent research and that it was worth no more or less than any other fiction book, making Roots an exercise in gross deception by its author. Perhaps the most damning attack on his book came in the form of allegations that he had lifted entire passages from another novel, The African by Harold Courlander (the case was settled out of court for a hefty fee with something of a plea of benign plagiarism on Haley's part). Critics who tried to follow Haley's line of research have claimed that his genealogical history is fatally flawed and that he may have even completely misjudged the existence of real people. The result is that today Roots tends to exist in this strange space where, despite its enormous commercial and cultural success, it isn't taken quite seriously either as an historical account or a work of fiction.

So: how fair are Haley's critics? Are they right to say that the book is riddled with historical inaccuracies and more or less worthless as an historical document? Well, a lot of that depends on what you mean by 'historical accuracy' - and exploring that concept can get quite messy very quickly. Generally speaking, when we're talking about 'historical accuracy' in popular culture, most people are talking about whether or not the work faithfully recreates the details of an event, person or period. Broadly, we want to know if the events depicted really happened in the way that they are shown, and if the characters on our page or screen really existed and behaved in that way. At the finer level we want to know if the details that bring the setting to life are correct: settings, costumes, language and so on. When something like Roots appears presented as a true story, we naturally want to find assurance that the author's claims are true and that he or she has thoroughly researched the subject matter at hand; we feel it important in these cases that the nitty-gritty details are mostly right to help keep the story from just being another work of imagination with no historical lessons.

It is true that in those terms the book does not hold up very well to historical scrutiny. Haley's representation of Kunta Kinte's life in both West Africa and the United States has been criticised for demonstrating an ignorance of scholarship, even on basic things at times. One commonly cited criticism is that Kunta Kinte is depicted as working on a cotton-harvesting plantation in Virginia, even though cotton harvesting was a rare practice in Virginia (certainly on the scale Roots seems to imply). Helen Taylor and others have argued that his depiction of life in West Africa is fundamentally flawed, with the novel talking about this "small dusty village" in "lush savanna country" when in reality Kunta Kinte was probably raised in a busy city of several thousand people. There is some evidence to suggest that his dating of events might be out by years, even decades in parts, and that the Gambian evidence for Kunta Kinte's existence does not align with the narrative Haley gives. It has also been argued that Haley misread records in the United States, confusing the identities of different people and as a result misrepresenting the history of his family. Hannah Little recently wrote a piece in Archival Science where she suggests that Toby - the name Haley claims Kunta Kinte was made to adopt - actually is the name of a completely different person, who was on the same plantation as Kinte for half a decade before Haley claims he arrived. There have been criticisms of how Haley represents the characters in his novel as well. Some have suggested that the women in his story are marginalised within the narrative compared to the men (I'd agree). One particularly harsh contention is that the character of Kunta Kinte is an anachronistic one based heavily on Malcolm X, intended to give readers an African hero to idolise at the expense of authenticity and a complex character. A few have noted that Haley pays a great deal of attention to the story of Kunta Kinte but significantly less to subsequent generations about who you would expect him to know more, implying strong embellishment or falsification of detail.

In a sense then, Roots appears to hold up quite badly against the historical and genealogical records. It certainly can't be described as a work of historical biography. For many - perhaps most - people this is enough to say that the novel has no worth except for its entertainment value and is best disregarded; whats the point of reading something that claims to be based on a true story if the evidence for the story is shaky and widely questioned? When it comes to slavery and especially to Roots though, I would caution that I think that this is a tremendous mistake. Although I would normally be the first to call out bad research in entertainment and how it spreads misconceptions through popular culture, I am not convinced that where it counts Roots is fatally lacking in accuracy. On the contrary, I think it is quite possibly the most powerful and most important representation of the experience of slavery in 20th century literature. To explain why that's the case, I need to delve a little into the actual text itself.

There are two key themes running throughout the Roots novel. The first is the trauma of being torn from Africa and the lasting impact that has on Kunta Kinte and his descendants; the second is the strength of the Black family and the incredible ability of Africans and their descendants to assert their family identity in the face of the horrific, dehumanising experience of transatlantic slavery. Both of these themes should stand out as being fairly obvious to anyone who has read the book or seen either TV series: the whole narrative is about the terrible experience of Kunta Kinte being trafficked out of Africa, followed by an ultimately inspiring story about how he built a rich and vibrant family life against the odds. Part of the problem with Roots' critics is that they have fundamentally misunderstood the significance of how Haley writes about these themes and how they come together.

Quite a few people over the years have suggested that Roots is the 'black Gone With the Wind' in terms of its character as well as its significance. That is to say, as a piece of literature it very closely mirrors the narrative structure of white novels that try to portray a benign experience of slavery, only from the perspective of enslaved African Americans. The argument goes something like this: Africa is akin to the glory days of peace and prosperity under slavery in Gone With the Wind; the harsh trauma of the middle passage is the equivalent to the destruction of the Civil War; and then the ultimate triumph of the African American family is the inverse of the ultimate triumph of white supremacist ideology after the war. But the idealisation of Africa and African people in Haley's writing does not quite fit the pattern this narrative requires. Haley’s Africa is still a world with war, poverty, starvation, violent crime and its own forms of forced labour. The Gambia is not shown as a land where all is sunshine and rainbows.

More of course can be said, but we had an AMA last year to tie in with the series which may be of interest for you!