53 pages • 1 hour read
Sankofa
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Chapters 1-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes descriptions of racism.
The novel begins in London six months after the death of protagonist Anna Graham’s mother, Bronwen Bain. Anna is a woman with a diverse racial heritage. Her mother is a white Englishwoman, while her father, Francis Aggrey, is a Black man. Anna knows little about her father beyond his name. Hailing from the fictional West African country of Bamana, Francis came to London in the 1960s to attend college. While boarding at the home of Anna’s great-grandfather, he met Bronwen and they conducted a brief, secret affair. Shortly after Bronwen became pregnant, Francis’s mother died, forcing him to cut short his university term and return to Bamana.
Now a middle-aged woman with an adult daughter of her own, Anna is curious about her father’s story. While sifting through her mother’s belongings, Anna opens a trunk that she found under her mother’s bed. Beneath a false bottom, she finds a scrapbook containing photos of Francis and two notebooks. The first notebook is Francis’s diary. In his earliest entries, Francis describes the virulent racism he faces from white Londoners. He is frustrated by his inability to stand up for himself in English; he has been “linguistically trained to turn the other cheek” (5) by the missionaries who taught him the language. Overwhelmed by new information, Anna closes the scrapbook and goes to bed. She contemplates the emptiness of the bed after the recent collapse of her marriage to her husband, Robert Graham.
Chapter 2 Summary
Anna wakes up thinking about her father. Francis and Bronwen met in 1969 during a time of heightened racial tensions in England. Anna wonders how Bronwen dared to conduct an affair with Francis under her father’s roof, and she laments that she will never be able to ask her mother about this time in her life. Anna resumes reading Francis’s journals.
Seeking a sense of belonging, Francis enrolls in an African student union and meets a man named Thomas Phiri, who is from Rhodesia (modern-day Zimbabwe). Francis quickly identifies Thomas as a socialist and a follower of the Pan-African movement. Thomas brings him to a meeting of the British Communist Party, but Francis is unconvinced by the visions of “a gaggle of Englishmen playing revolutionaries” (11). After Francis is harassed by his landlady’s racist son, he moves into Thomas’s apartment.
Reading her father’s diary, Anna worries that Thomas is radicalizing the young Francis. Still, she is pleased by the increasingly fiery temperament that he displays in these latest entries. She reflects that when she herself faced microaggressions and racial abuse as a child, Bronwen always instructed her to respond with unwavering politeness. Anna believes that Francis would have taught her how to fight back. Anna continues to peruse the diary, and Francis describes meeting Thomas’s mentor, Ras Menelik, who heads up a movement for African emancipation. At one of Menelik’s meetings, Francis meets Anna’s Aunt Caryl. The two date briefly but form no serious attachments.
Anna wishes she had someone to talk to about this new information, but she has lost all her friends in the wake of her divorce. Instead, she calls her daughter, Rose. Rose is 25 and lives on her own, traveling often for work. They talk briefly before Rose boards a plane to Mumbai.
Chapter 3 Summary
On Sunday morning, Anna goes to the park. She recalls growing up during a period of racial strife in the UK, often witnessing white supremacist demonstrations on the local news. Bronwen tried to shield Anna from this reality. Once, Anna asked her mother whether it was hard to raise a child with a diverse racial background. Shocked, Bronwen responded, “You’re just the same as me,” an idea that Anna refers to as her mother’s “special fantasy” (22).
At Rose’s behest, Anna meets with a lawyer to inquire about starting divorce proceedings. When the lawyer asks her if she is sure about her decision, Anna hesitates. Inwardly, she concludes that her desire to get divorced is outweighed by a greater desire to go to Bamana and learn more about her father. She leaves the office without taking action. On the bus home, Anna contemplates how she will afford a trip to Bamana; her best options are to either complete a divorce or sell her mother’s flat. She recalls the night she met Robert at a bar and wonders what would have become of her career in architecture if they had never met, given that she gave up on her ambitions shortly after marrying him.
Chapter 4 Summary
Anna visits the British Museum. After viewing some pieces in the African history section, she settles down in the museum’s café to finish reading Francis’s diary.
Francis’s writing reveals that Thomas’s wife, Blessing, has decided to emigrate to America, and Francis must move out of Thomas’s flat within a week. Aunt Caryl arranges a spot for him in the flat of her father, Owen, alongside Owen and Bronwen. Upon meeting Bronwen, Francis is struck by her beauty. One night, he walks in on her as she bathes and begins to seduce her, but their encounter is cut short when she asks him to stop. Several days later, she surprises him while he is naked in his bedroom, and they consummate their affair. Anna is disturbed at what she perceives as predatory behavior from her father, who was 25 at the time, while her mother was only 18.
The diary entries continue. Ras Menelik is arrested for treason due to his plans to sell weapons purchased from Russian arms dealers to the African National Congress. Thomas, shocked by the betrayal of his mentor, begins to distance himself from the African liberation movement. When Francis receives a letter from his uncle telling him that his mother is dying, he books passage back to Bamana and bids goodbye to Bronwen, leaving his diary with her for safekeeping. He notes Bronwen’s proclamation that Francis will never come back to England.
Stepping out of the café, Anna experiences a panic attack and calls her neighbor Katherine, who has previously offered her support in such instances. Katherine promises to wait for her at her house.
Chapter 5 Summary
Katherine and Anna discuss the events of the past few days. When Anna expresses regret about her marriage, Katherine tells her that everything happens for a reason. Katherine herself found community and solace in the local church after losing her job several years ago.
After Katherine leaves, Anna returns to Bronwen’s trunk and opens the second notebook. She is shocked to discover newspaper clippings detailing her father’s transformation into a radical activist in Bamana. After his return to Bamana, he shortened his given name, Francis Kofi Adjei Aggrey, to just Kofi Adjei. Kofi founded the Diamond Coast Liberation Group (DCLG) and orchestrated several acts of violent resistance in Mion, including the kidnapping of three British mine owners, the shooting of another, and an attack on a local police station. He was arrested in 1972 and released in 1977 after amnesty talks between the DCLG and the British government. Upon his release, Kofi was elected Bamana’s first prime minister.
Chapter 6 Summary
Anna reads Kofi Adjei’s Wikipedia page. She learns that he was prime minister for 30 years, a length of term that suggests a dictatorship. He now has a family in Africa, including a wife and several children.
Anna attends church with Katherine but doesn’t feel particularly moved by the service. She meets the vicar, a man named Carl Offor. Returning home, she discovers a letter from Robert that inquires after her well-being. She recalls how she found out about his affair; his mistress sent him a text while Anna was using his phone. The woman with whom Robert had an affair was the only other Black woman working in his office.
Chapters 1-6 Analysis
In the early chapters of Sankofa, protagonist Anna is adrift after the recent death of her mother and the subsequent dissolution of her marriage, which have robbed her of the identity markers of daughter and wife, respectively. To compound her sense of isolation, her own daughter, Rose, is now an adult and is living on her own. Thus, the very first pages of Sankofa work to establish Anna’s lack of human contact and resultant curiosity about her own origins, precipitating the theme of Diverse Racial Heritage and the Search for Identity. Anna’s complex racial identity contributes to her lack of connection to her current surroundings, for because she is the daughter of a Black West African man and a white English woman, she has always been subject to uncomfortable experiences of being “othered” while in London. During her childhood and adolescence, the city often reflected distinctly racist undertones, and this experience affected her in myriad ways. In the absence of her father, Anna was raised primarily by her mother, Bronwen, who actively avoided teaching Anna about her heritage and instead adopted a color-blind attitude. Bronwen’s avoidant philosophy prevented her from acknowledging how profoundly her own daughter’s experiences in the world are shaped by societal attitudes about race. For example, retrospective passages in the novel reveal that when Anna was a child, Bronwen essentially treated her as if she were a white person, and this well-intentioned yet misguided choice caused Anna to grow up feeling rejected and isolated. When Anna tried to talk to her mother about the racism and abuses that she was forced to endure at school, Bronwen invalidated her experiences with the platitude that she and her daughter were “just the same” (22), a fundamentally untrue statement in light of the unequal treatment that Anna receives from her peers throughout her life.
As a result of these problematic family patterns and broader cultural dynamics, Anna has developed an insecure sense of self that affects how she relates to her surroundings as an adult. For example, she feels drawn to the African room at the British Museum but is unsure how to relate to exhibitions of artifacts that focus on a part of her heritage that she doesn’t fully understand, especially when the English have essentially stolen said artifacts from their places of origin. In addition to delivering a thinly veiled critique of the British Museum’s highly problematic acquisition practices, Chibundu Onuzo also makes it a point to emphasize the importance of heritage in establishing identity. With a large chunk of Anna’s past missing, she cannot fully know herself, and her awkward explorations of the museum aptly highlight this internal conflict. Against the backdrop of these larger cultural issues, the discovery of Francis’s diary appropriately offers Anna an enticing link to her missing heritage.
Closely related to these underlying issues is the theme of Race and Contextual Power, for Anna has long been subjected to racial abuse and discrimination during her time in England. Because Bronwen has deprived her of the social tools she needs to properly confront, process, and fight back against these experiences, Anna has become hyperaware of the negative ways in which white Londoners often perceive her, but she also feels powerless to respond and assert her own boundaries. For example, when she is unexpectedly accused of being an abusive “nanny” to Rose, the racist comment leaves Anna “too stunned to claim [her] daughter” (65). Reading through her father’s diary entries, Anna is particularly inspired by Kofi’s decision to embrace antiracism and de-colonialism because he is fighting back against his powerless position in a way that she has not been able to do.
Kofi’s writings illustrate the fact that power is not an absolute characteristic and can shift easily relative to social context. In one sense, Kofi is in a position of power over Bronwen during their affair, due to his age and gender. This dynamic is reflected in Anna’s speculation that her father may have taken advantage of her mother. However, when viewed through the lens of race, the calculus of power must be analyzed a bit differently, for as a white woman in London, Bronwen holds immense power over Francis. If she were to report their affair, she would be protected, while Francis would likely be prosecuted or worse.
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