Sankofa: A Second Life for a Canonical African American Film
By Liam Lacey
Rating: A
Say what you like about Netflix and its meagre classic film catalogue. In the case of Sankofa, a canonical modern African American film, the mainstream streamer has beaten the prestigious Criterion Collection to the punch.
Brought to Netflix by director Ava DuVernay’s Array Releasing in a new 4K restoration, Sankofa will get a far broader audience than when first released back in 1993, when it was overlooked by mainstream and distributed independently by its filmmaker to African American communities.
Designed as an exercise in immersive consciousness-raising of enslaved Africans resistance, Sankofa is the best-known film from the Haile Gerima, an Ethiopian-born filmmaker. Currently at Howard University, Gerima is a central figure the Los Angeles School of Black Filmmakers, along with Charles Burnett (Killer of Sheep) and Julie Dash (Daughters of the Dusk).
The story Sankofa tells begins in the present-day on a seaside coast of Ghana outside a former slave fortress where a tour group is gathered. An African-America model, Mona (Oyafunmike Ogunlano) is rolling on the ground in an animal-print bathing suit while being snapped at and cajoled by a smarmy white photographer. The photo shoot is suddenly interrupted by a shamanistic drummer and singer in traditional dress, named Sankofa (Kofi Ghanaba). The man invokes the spirits of the dead and instructs Mona to “go back to your past” before he’s chased away by a policeman.
Mona retreats into the basement of a nearby fortress, where she suddenly is confronted by rows of chained men, women, and children. Despite her protests that she’s an American, she is stripped and branded to be loaded on the ship.
When she re-emerges on a Louisiana plantation some time in the early 19th century, she has a new identity, Shola, an enslaved woman who has spent her life as a house slave. Though initially a devout Christian, she allies herself with the resistance movement, meeting under cover of the sugar cane or in caves with Shango (Mutabaruka), a rebellious former Jamaican field worker, and finds inspiration in Nunu (Alexandra Duah), an older African woman, who imparts tradition to the children.
The conflicted characters include Noble Ali (Afemo Omilami), who abases himself for the moderately privileged position of overseer in the field workers, and Joe (Nick Medley), a light-skinned devout Christian, taught to worship whiteness through the guidance of a Spanish priest.
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Scenes increase in brutality and then, climactic, cathartic violence until Mona — like Dorothy awaking from the fantasy of Oz — remerges, wearing traditional African dress and the faraway gaze of a trauma survivor.
A minority of critics argued that Steve McQueen’s Oscar-winning 12 Years a Slave failed by not showing enslaved people’s resistance or by indulging in torture porn to make the obvious point that slavery was bad. Germina is clearly conscious of both pitfalls.
The focus of his story is rebellion and liberation and treating his story as a sombre fable of a soul’s journey through time, he turns the luridly familiar to something poetic and tragic. Sankofa, with its portrayal of brutal indignities and didactic messaging is far from an easy watch, but it’s a compelling one: the artful framing, continuity jumps, mixture of new and old African-derived musical styles, from a filmmaker on a quest to find a fresh form of storytelling that resists the Hollywood model.
That quest is tied up in the film’s title, Sankofa, a word from the Ghana’s Akan people meaning “retrieve.” The concept is represented by a popular African diaspora symbol of a bird flying forward with its head turned backward holding a precious egg in its mouth, recovering what was lost in order to move forward. It’s a fitting title for an important film given a second life.
Sankofa. Directed and written by Haile Germina. Starring Oyafunmike Ogunlano, Mutabaruka, Alexandra Duah, Nick Medley and Kofi Ghanaba. Available on Netflix from September 24.