Roots - What It Means To Be Free.

         The power to be.

    "They can put chains over your  body but never    let them put them on your mind".



King Kunta said, to his daughter, "I'm raising you to be a warrior to stay free".
   Most of scenarios in the middle of the movie was teary, the slavery, mistreatment of black people, the rape of black girls, and the hate that lingers in the eyes of the white people.
 I was angry, it made you want to scream "freedom". But I realised more in the movie, it was not about the slavery and I admired the power of the blacks to fight for freedom, to get free.

 "A warrior is not the one who fights in a war, a warrior is one who still fights even when there is no reason to stay alive. And that is a true hero".
      '  We were treated like properties
        Just like their hounds and horses.
        They put out cigars in our eyes and.                 burnt out our souls
        We had ropes for our pants.
        Our breakfasts were often rotten .
    In the fields we worked off our waists.   day and night because we had brown nose.'
 

Roots opens a wide range of history of the blacks, the conflicts, the self determination and what it means to be free.

We don't have the chains over our bodies anymore but in our minds there are their chains. Our minds are enslaved.

 This journey to be free, isn't straight. We Africans don't know what it means to be free, or our roots. We have been mentally enslaved, to think a certain way, to give a name to our Africaness.

 Slavery is deeper, it manipulates our minds, but it isn't about breaking up the chains, it is about losing the chains off our mind.

We are conflicted. What it means to free. It means I am not ashamed to wear my natural thick hair, I don't have to have a certain accent to be called 'intelligent', I don't have to dress up like a white man to be respected. I don't have to like a certain kind of food to be civilized, I get to choose my religion not beaten into it. I don't want to be brainwashed to think my culture is barbaric, or have standards of conduct for my social life.

  Life ain't shit, if I can't speak like this, without the whites calling us 'Unintelligent Nigga'.  We ain't free yet if they keep mirroring us to a single story of poverty and disaster.  We want the freedom to mirror ourselves and our beauty in our own ways. To stay free.

"Race is America's original sin "

- Chiamanda Ngozi Adichie.