53 pages • 1 hour read
Sankofa
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Diverse Racial Heritage and the Search for Identity
Sankofa is primarily the story of Anna Bain’s journey to discover who she is. Because she is the daughter of a Black West African man and a white woman, Anna has always felt fundamentally different from the people around her, for although she technically belongs to two groups, she does not fit fully into either one. In Sankofa, Chibundu Onuzo illustrates the complexity of such experiences and emphasizes the importance of connecting to all aspects of one’s ethnicity and heritage. Thus, the novel also explores the fact that even a well-intentioned ignorance of race—as Bronwen demonstrates in her parenting style—can also be harmful, for it prevents the child in question from forming a complete identity that embraces the whole of who they are.
Although Bronwen was a loving mother who tried her best to give Anna a good childhood, her privileged background as a white Englishwoman has denied her the knowledge and the tools to help Anna understand her diverse racial heritage. Anna’s childhood spans the 1970s and 1980s, during which Black people in the UK were often targeted by far-right groups. As a result, Anna regularly faced images of racism and race-based violence, but when she turned to her mother for help in understanding these things, Bronwen provided little assistance. Rather than educating Anna about the realities of racism, Bronwen chose to ignore the issue entirely, as though by choosing not to acknowledge race and racial issues, she could create a world in which such things do not exist at all. However, by telling Anna that she is the same as her white family members, she creates a dynamic that implicitly forbids Anna from acknowledging her full self even as she must continue to struggle with the negative ways in which others perceive her. Thus, Anna is attuned to the microaggressions and macroaggressions aimed at her in daily life, but she doesn’t know how to stand up for herself. Her disconnection from Black culture also makes it harder for her to fit into Black spaces, for in such contexts, she is often perceived as being “too white.”
As an adult, Anna is married to a white man and has a daughter whose physical appearance causes most people to assume that she is a white woman. Both Robert and Rose espouse the opinion that modern England is a post-racial society. They are not acting maliciously; rather, they truly believe that race does not divide people anymore. However, Onuzo’s narrative implicitly asserts that such a view is based upon a combination of privilege and ignorance. As Anna says, “To ignore race [is] to attempt to be white” (138). Thus, the narrative often reveals that Sankofa’s white characters take their innate sense of safety and belonging for granted, while Anna herself has never been able to enjoy this benefit. She therefore experiences the world in a fundamentally different way from her husband, her mother, and even her daughter, and she cannot make them see what she sees. Within London, Anna’s experiences of racism are consistently invalidated under her family’s guise of a progressive mindset, and this conflict leads her to perceive her Black and white sides as “two warring streams” (291) that keep her in a state of turmoil.
In Bamana, Anna hopes to find a sense of belonging and an answer to who she is, but initially, she feels just as out of place as she did in London. She stands out among Black Bamanians for her lighter complexion and is therefore treated differently, marked out as “half-caste” or obroni. The prevailing attitude in which people instinctively “ostracize the outsider” (183) also still applies, for even Kofi falters in his attempts to understand her identity, telling her, “You are not white” (183) and attributing her criticism of him to “the obroni way” (283). As she struggles to reconcile these different perceptions of her identity, Anna worries that there is nowhere in the world that she will fit in, and she only makes real progress toward finding herself when she begins to learn more about her Bamanian heritage, spending quality time with the Adjei family. As Kofi educates her about the nuances of Bamanian culture, traditions, and folklore, he and Anna have several frank and cathartic discussions about racism that validate the decades’ worth of such experiences that Anna has been forced to ignore.
The key moment of Anna’s search for self comes late in the novel when she undergoes Wuyo Ama’s ritual and accepts that the two sides of her identity are not in conflict with one another. During the ritual, Anna finds closure in her relationships with both Bronwen and Kofi. She emerges from Wuyo Ama’s house feeling as if “a struggle [is] over” (291). In this moment, her Bamanian and English heritage come together in harmony to make her a complete person: Anna Nana Bain-Aggrey. That Anna can only achieve this acceptance after finally connecting to her Black and African roots is a testament to the importance of having open and honest discussions about the role that race plays in individual experiences of the world.
Theoretical Politics Versus the Reality of Power
Much of Sankofa’s plot revolves around Anna tracing her father’s evolution from Francis Aggrey, an idealistic revolutionary who stood up for the rights of disenfranchised Bamanians, to Kofi Adjei, a prime minister known for corruption and cruelty. Through Kofi’s transformation over his 30-year term in office, Onuzo explores the difference between engaging in theoretical politics and holding real political power in a country that has a long history of oppression.
Within this framework, it is also important to note that Kofi does not start out with political ambitions. Instead, his diary paints a picture of a young student who is only reluctantly drawn into politics because he feels powerless to defend himself against the racial abuse he experiences in London. Noting that the city “does one of two things to a [B]lack man: cows him or turns him into a radical” (11), Kofi goes down the latter path after meeting Thomas Phiri and becoming involved in the African leftist movement. Embracing their ideals of socialism and Pan-Africanism, Kofi becomes a guerilla fighter and founds the Diamond Coast Liberation Group in service of his mission to free West Africa from colonialism. Although Anna does not always agree with his methods, she is nonetheless inspired by this vision of her father: a man who is willing to put his life on the line for the greater good.
Inspired by this idealistic view of her father, Anna is therefore devastated to learn that Kofi’s 30-year tenure as prime minister has led him to adopt practices that cause many to brand him a despot, and she is most disturbed by his potential involvement in the unsolved murders of the Kinnakro Five. When Anna goes to Bamana in search of answers, she finds Kofi to be a controversial political leader whose attitudes and reputation differ wildly from his early history as Francis, the revolutionary. She finds Kofi to be arrogant, greedy, and coldly practical. Although his crowning achievement is the liberation of Bamana, it appears to be a liberation in name only, for Bamana’s resources remain under European control and its citizens remain in poverty. Thus, while Kofi is admired by the older generations of Bamana, the younger generation considers him to be an ineffectual tyrant.
The author draws extensively from real-life figures and crafts Kofi’s character as an amalgamation of many problematic patterns. Historically, after large-scale liberation was achieved in West Africa, the area has since experienced a pattern of corrupt public officials and authoritarian government regimes. Onuzo has said in interviews that she wanted Kofi’s story to represent the wasted hope of a generation during the postcolonial period. Due to the passage of several unseen decades between Kofi’s diary entries and his meeting with Anna, the exact reasons behind this squandered hope remain obscured, but Onuzo touches on several possible contributing factors. One of these is personal folly, for Kofi Adjei clearly enjoys the sort of power that was completely denied to him as Francis Aggrey. Francis was treated “like [an] animal” (181) in London, while Kofi commands respect, obedience, and fear wherever he goes. Anna herself notes what a rare sight it is to see “a Black man presented in public [as] regal [and] beloved” (193). Yet as Adrian observes, “Power corrupts everywhere” (86). Thus, the narrative implies that Kofi may be particularly susceptible to corruption because he knows exactly what subjugation and disempowerment feel like and is determined to never again be on the receiving end.
Though Anna is quick to condemn her father’s choices in life, the narrative also offers more sympathetic reasons for Kofi’s failure to achieve the utopia he promised his fellow Bamanian citizens. In Chapter 29, for example, Kofi tells Anna that effecting change is not as easy as it seems from the outside. Despite the overt trend of decolonization, major European powers still control most of the resources in Africa, and wresting away that control is far easier said than done. As a young man, Kofi was able to speculate on the possibilities of a brighter future without having to confront the reality of the hard, painful, and sometimes impossible work that achieving such an ambitious goal requires. Even during his time as a guerilla fighter, he had a straightforward, single-minded objective, but as prime minister, he has had to contend with the complex relationships between world powers and the ongoing legacy of colonialism. Ultimately, Sankofa offers no easy answers to the creeping effects of corruption and does not attempt to put forth a definitive solution. Instead, Onuzo’s narrative brings the issue into sharp focus in a mainstream format that encourages contemplation about the many complex factors that can influence the trajectory of leaders and their governments.
Race and Contextual Power
For Sankofa’s Black characters, power is always contextual, for they frequently experience changes in their social status and the amount of respect they command as they move through different countries and spheres of society. Onuzo explores how profoundly these shifting social contexts can change an individual’s experience of power even as the underlying systemic power structures of different nations remain essentially the same. The most dramatic shift is the one that Kofi experiences. In the 1960s, he is a poor Black immigrant in London, existing on one of the lowest rungs of the social hierarchy. He is targeted by vicious verbal abuse and discrimination but has no choice except to ignore it or risk physical harm. Joining the African student union is his first opportunity to fight back against total disenfranchisement, and this occurrence fuels his evolution into a revolutionary, which in turn launches his political career in Bamana. When Kofi later returns to London as prime minister, he is amazed to discover that England feels like “a different country” (181), for in his new role as prime minister, he is treated with great respect and is welcomed into the same spaces from which he was previously shunned. His identity has not changed, but society now rearranges itself to account for his increased social and political status in the world.
Anna also experiences significant shifts in her social status. While growing up in London during the 1970s, she is subjected to repeated instances of racial abuse, from people “always [wanting] to touch [her] hair” (104) to being called racial slurs outright. When she enters Bamana, most of the country’s Black population sees her as being a white woman, and this perception grants her increased privileges, as does her connection to the powerful Adjei family. This new social context causes other Bamanians to treat her with deference, and she also receives preferential treatment over Black Indigenous Bamanians, as when she is given water in prison while the other prisoners’ requests are ignored.
However, the narrative also asserts that these shifts in relative power, though dramatic, are also superficial. In Chapter 21, for example, Kofi notes that he could never have returned to London as “an ordinary Black man” (181), for after his activities as a guerrilla fighter, the English media vilified him, and he would have been in danger if he had returned without the protection of his heightened political status. The ostensible improvement in social dynamics that he experiences upon his return is therefore no more than a façade. Kofi is shielded by his new power, but the racist attitudes that informed his treatment when he studied in London have not gone away. They are still present just beneath the surface, as Anna’s experiences throughout her childhood and into her adulthood serve to demonstrate. If Kofi were to lose his political status, he would be subject to the same racist abuse that he experienced in London as a young man.
Conversely, Anna quietly notes that the white men she interacts with in Bamana, Adrian and Ken, always move through the world with absolute confidence, and unlike Kofi, their power is not circumstantial, for they are treated well no matter where they go. They have no need to prove themselves worthy of respect because respect is given to them by default. Additional side-effects of this privileged existence are displayed when both Adrian and Ken tend to speak over Anna and invalidate her opinions, thereby illustrating that they still view her as being less knowledgeable than themselves, even in the context of her home country. Onuzo’s inclusion of these characters rounds out the theme and highlights the inequity of a system that bestows power so freely upon certain people while denying it to others based on the specific circumstances in which they find themselves.
Unlock all 53 pages of this Study GuidePlus, gain access to 8,800+ more expert-written Study Guides.
Including features: