The movie Sankofa takes place on the coast of Ghana. Mona travels back to the past to reclaim her identity. She becomes a house slave named Shola living on a plantation. She lives her life being raped and abused by her slave owner. Through this journey, Mona looks to find out who she really is through the people she meets, the African perception of identity, the meaning and connection to Sankofa, and what it suggests to Africans and non-Africans. In the beginning of the movie, this beautiful African- American woman Mona is modeling in the water with a stern seductive face.
Wearing a blonde wig, a zebra print swim suite, and long fingernails, she roles around in the sand in all different poses for her white photographer. He instructs her to be sexy and flirty while he snaps photos of every move she makes. Mona is fulfilling the role of an ideal European model, and has lost her own self-identity in the process. The Eurocentric worldviews of what is accepted and what is pretty has led Mona to loose her own identity of who she really is and where she came from. Therefore, Mona’s curiosity leads her to a dramatic change in herself, and a whole new perspective.
Certainly, every character Mona meets plays a crucial role in her transformation or new perspective on life. They all show her the importance of being a strong woman and teach her about her past. Nunu for example, knows many stories about their homeland of Africa and teaches it to the slaves on the planation who are willing to listen. She sees how Nunu’s own son Joe doesn’t love her, and Mona looks up to Nunu as her own mother. The sacrifices Nunu makes for Joe and the other slaves makes Mona want to be as fearless and brave as her. On the other hand, Mona encounters Joe, which is Nunu’s son.
Nunu was raped by a white man and from this experience Joe came along. Joe is unsure of his own identity since he has a white father and black mother. He cannot identify with the black people, or the African culture. He is a Christian who believes strongly in God and thinks his own mother is the devil, because the influences from his own priest. After he kills his mother, he realizes how he betrayed his own people and family. Although, in the end he demands respect for his mother and shows it by killing the priest who called his mother a heathen.
However, there was one person very special to Mona as she undergoes her transformation from Mona to Shola, and back to herself again throughout the movie. Shango was his name; he was sold to the plantation from the West Indies because he was a troublemaker. Mona is in love with Shango even though he is always getting into trouble. He eventually gives Mona a Sankofa bird after she is beaten and whipped for running away. Once she put that Sankofa bird around her neck she was not afraid anymore and becomes a rebel.
She starts attending late night meetings with him and helping plan their escape to freedom now that she was no longer afraid of anything. As a result of meeting all these characters, her perception of African history and identity have completely changed. She now realized Africans believed in honoring and respecting their identity. They have a lot of respect for their land and for those who suffered for freedom from the white man. This is why at the beginning of the movie Sankofa was yelling at the white photographer to leave his land for showing no respect.
He repeatedly told her she needed to go back to her past, which she tried to ignore because she was frightened by the thought of her true identity. The African people will never let themselves forget the past. Only after being in the past and transforming into Shola she sees why Africans cherish their history. By remembering and looking back to the past helps one to move forward and do better than what the past had to offer. Which is what the Sankofa bird wants Mona to learn to do in this movie. In fact, the word Sankofa means, “We must reclaim the past in order to go forward. At the beginning of the movie the scene keeps flashing back to a bird. The bird represented the Sankofa bird that Shango gave Shola to wear around her neck. This bird gave her the strength to no longer hold fear and to be a rebel, which is how she became connected to Sankofa. The bird is shown flying forward while looking back. This means to move forwarded is necessary, but do not forget to recall the past. The whole idea that is trying to be depicted is her ancestors and roots are important, but the future should be just as important too.
The Sankofa bird takes on many forms, a necklace, a drummer, or a bird. Yet, all are connected to the same meaning. Also, the movie illustrates how the drummer tells Mona to go back to her past. Sankofa is looking backwards to the past in order to grow and move forward to what the future holds. This is directly related to Mona’s transformation she makes after going back and experiencing where she came from. She starts this journey naive and unsure of her identity or history, but after seeing the past she matures and and finds herself.
This suggests to Mona that she should not be ashamed of her culture and moral beliefs. Furthermore, Africans and non-Africans alike should learn from the past to prepare for the future. Africans have been decolonized and stripped of their beliefs during slavery. Therefore, it is that much more important for non-Africans to be taught about this lost Akan concept of having the desire to understand the worldview of African ancestors and to adopt some of their social practices and beliefs, because they can learn from these views.
Africans need to pass along this meaning of Sankofa in order to preserve their culture and educate other non-Africans on how to become a unifying force that learns from the past, and can create an identity for their future. Overall, Haile Gerima, the writer, did an amazing job showing the lifestyle African Americans had during this time. Mona is pushed to her limits and re- born after all her encounter with the past. While Nunu, Shango, and Joe all helped her understand the harsh realities of her identity along the way.
The meaning of the word Sankofa is unclear at the beginning, but as the story continues on and as Mona develops, so does the understanding of what Sankofa is. Her transformation between two different people helped her gain a new perspective of herself. Mona no longer questions who she really is, the African perception of identity, the meaning of Sankofa, or why she had a connection. Through all of these things she finally found out what it means to have a so-called “identity. ”
