In 1993, Haile Gerima, an Ethiopian-American filmmaker, released the movie Sankofa which he had also written and directed. The movie was an underground hit because of its realistic portrayal of slavery and its call for the black community to take stock and recognition of the black backs that were broken for them to be where they are. The actual word “sankofa” comes from a Ghanian language called Akan which means to “go back and take.” It is also an Adinkra symbol from the Akans which depicts a bird with its neck stretching back to the back of its body and also a symbol that looks much like the Western symbol of the heart. Each use of sankofa has the same purpose which is to signify the importance and necessity of learning from the past.
The movie Sankofa is about an African-American model named Mona who is doing a photo shoot in Ghana. She is depicted as very self-absorbed and very unaware of where she came from. While she is doing this photo shoot on the beach right outside of the Cape Coast Castle in Ghana, she is confronted by a witch-doctor named Sankofa who considers himself the guardian of the castle. He starts yelling at her in an African language (presumably Akan) and puts a curse on her that she would go back to where she came from. She is thrust back in time and finds herself as a slave named Shola who is constantly being raped and abused by the white slave owners. She is a timid house-slave that has been born into slavery, but she is constantly being inspired by a West Indian slave named Shongo, whom she loves, and a venerable African woman named Nunu who helps the other slaves remember their homeland. As Shola, Mona gets to witness firsthand the horrors of slavery and just what her ancestors had to pay for in order for her to enjoy the glamorous life that she does, and Shola herself learns the importance of her African heritage and of standing up for yourself. There are many conflicts among the slaves including Nunu's despair over her son, Joe, who is the head slave and also the product of a white man raping her when she was coming over on the boat.
In the beginning of the film, Mona is a typical American who is oblivious of everything around her. She is trying to do a sexy photo shoot with a white photographer on sacred land of the Akan people and does not even seem to understand why that would upset the local people. Being a black American, it would be tough to assume that Gerima wanted us to think that Mona did not even know about the slave struggle, but instead I believe he wanted us to think that she had forgotten about it. He was making a statement saying that the African-American people cannot afford to forget the struggles of those who have gone before. Shola, in contrast to her present-day self Mona, is a woman who is constantly learning from the people around her just how enslaved and displaced that she is. She states at one point that because she was born into slavery she did not have the sense of loss for home that the other slaves felt. It was a special cruelty to the African and other enslaved black people to know that the more that children were born into slavery, the more they would forget that this was not the world that was meant for them; this was not their home. Mona learns through all of this to take heed of the eyes that are watching her from the past. The eyes that are saying, “Look what we went through. Make it worth something, and please don't forget.”
This film is probably one of the most realistic portrayals of the the actual slavery system ever put on film, especially up to the point when Gerima put out the movie. It is not a typical Hollywood movie that depicts slaves as happy, singing, dancing farm-help who would love nothing more than to cater to the whims of their white masters. The film showcased the fact these people, who were uprooted from their homeland, were beaten, raped, abused, branded, murdered, and brainwashed all in the name of keeping them in their place. A few of the slaves were given special treatment from the white authority figures because of their willingness to be head slaves and dole out punishment when needed to ones that were out of line. Joe, Nunu's son, was the most egregious of the head slaves and was an interesting take on the tragic mulatto type made famous and ultimately defined by Dorothy Dandridge in the 1950s (Bogle 167). He is not a typical tragic mulatto which was often a woman's role, but I took him as a hybrid between a tragic mulatto and the unfortunate role of the uncle tom. He was apparently brainwashed as a child into believing that the African people were heathens, and he hid behind the white god that told him to turn his back on his black people. In the end, he amps up the tragedy by killing his mother Nunu and then realizing the extent of the hate that was mainlined into his heart by a religious system that had nothing to do with his black roots.
I believe that this film fits very well into the discourse which was calls for more accurate and intelligent portrayals of the black community in film. It closely relates to many of the films that are important in the black film community. There were several scenes throughout Sankofa which showed the slaves banding together and forming a covert alliance to overthrow their white masters; one being when they all meet down in the caves to initiate their new members. That theme of unification to fight against the white power regime is a common one in the great black films. One of the most important connections, I believe, was in the documentary entitled Malcolm X (not the Spike Lee film). His discourse about bridging international barriers to connect the black community of the world together to abolish the hatred and discrimination that they were facing globally is directly connected to Sankofa especially since you see black people from multiple nations (Shango was from the West Indies, Shola born in America, and Nunu and others were directly from Africa) working together to rid themselves of the white supremacy that was beating down on them. Of course, this idea of unity and standing your ground was also shown in the film Nothing But a Man when Duff tries to get the mill workers to come together and in the film The Spook Who Sat By the Door when Dan Freeman organizes the black street gangs around the country.
Another common theme was the dynamics of the parent/child relationship and how that affects a person's identity. Throughout Sankofa, Nunu grieves because of the outcome of her son Joe. This is most obvious when Joe chases her to the pond and she is telling him that she carried him in her stomach for nine months and that he was nourished from her breasts, and brought up in her arms, but he still kills her in his rage. One originally thinks that she failed in passing on her code of ethics and identity to him, but it appears, through his remorse for what he does to her, that she did pass on her sense of pride and morality to him, but that it was only suppressed under the white Catholicism and hatred that was drilled into him by the white man. This idea of passing on values was another common theme in a lot of the important black films such as in The Learning Tree when Sarah teaches Newt about judging people by their character. It also is a common theme in Edward Jones's book Lost in the City brought up in stories like “A New Man,” “The Store,” and in “His Mother's House.” An interesting look at what happens when that passing on of values is deteriorated is noted by the parental failure of Gary and Fran in the HBO mini-series The Corner.
There is one more scene that has really haunted me, so to speak, from Sankofa. In the early part of the movie, the witch-doctor, Sankofa himself, not only curses Mona sending her back in time, but runs off a crew of white tourists out of the castle. After reading the piece “Who Gets to Tell a Black Story” by Janny Scott, I realized the inherent irony when white people academically and artistically delve into the struggle of the black people. In the scene where Sankofa runs off the tourists and curses Mona back to her roots, I was struck by the idea that it often seems the vast majority of white people are tourists of the black struggle. They may be generally interested and concerned, but they really do nothing more than put a quarter in the viewfinder and look at it from a safe distance. Also, from reading and watching various texts of the black film discussion, I have sensed such a huge need for black individuals to tell the black story. Some of the greatest artistic racial documents have been put together by white people such as Nothing But a Man and The Corner, but it almost seems like a false sentiment when white people exercise their abilities to further the black cause or knock down stereotypes and barriers. It seems to me that the best way a white person can help the black struggle is to do everything possible not to make change themselves, but to facilitate a person of color making that change for their own community.
Fims mentioned in this post:
The Learning Tree (1969)
Malcolm X (Documentary)
Nothing But a Man (1964)
The Corner (2000 HBO Mini-Series)
Books mentioned or used:
Toms, Coons, Mulattos, Mammies, and Bucks- Donald Bogle
Lost in the City- Edward P. Jones
"Who Gets to Tell a Black Story?"- Janny Scott
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