53 pages • 1-hour read
Sankofa
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Chapters 13-18Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 13 Summary
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes descriptions of racism.
Anna returns home to a message from her real estate agent; she has received an offer of 400,000 pounds on her mother’s flat. Anna is elated to realize that she can now afford the trip to Bamana. Anna visits her mother’s flat one final time. Walking through the bare rooms, she recalls her childhood. Though she had a good relationship with her mother, they clashed on the topic of race. Although Anna faced microaggressions and macroaggressions from white Londoners, Bronwen accused her daughter of being overly sensitive and told her to brush off the experiences. Bronwen’s insistence on ignoring everything to do with race and racism left Anna without “a sense of rightness, a sense of self” (104). Even as an adult, Anna could never speak to Bronwen about her childhood in a way that her mother could understand. Still, Anna acknowledges that Bronwen was a good parent.
Chapter 14 Summary
Anna visits her Aunt Caryl at the nursing home where she has resided since receiving a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s. In a rare lucid moment, Aunt Caryl approves of Anna’s plans to visit her father. Anna recalls that as a child, her mother and grandfather practiced a “farcical, almost sinister” (109) denial of her racial and ethnic identity. By contrast, Aunt Caryl always encouraged her to explore and strengthen her ties to her African roots. When Anna was six, Aunt Caryl took her to the Notting Hill Caribbean Carnival. A small riot at the carnival led Bronwen to forbid Anna from ever attending such an event again. Now, Anna asks Aunt Caryl whether Kofi knew that he had a daughter, but Aunt Caryl’s brief moment of lucidity has passed, and she no longer remembers Bronwen.
Chapter 15 Summary
Anna goes to the Bamana High Commission to get a visa. In the line, she meets an older white man named Ken, who identifies himself as a consultant for emerging markets. A minor argument breaks out between several Bamanian citizens, who disagree about whether the new president, Owusu, is an improvement over Kofi. Owusu’s supporters argue that Kofi kept Bamana too isolated, while Kofi’s supporters believe that Owusu is “just selling [Bamana] to foreigners” (118).
Anna succeeds in getting a visa, but she is compelled to pay a bribe to the agent processing her application. Afterward, she meets Katherine at a café for tea. Observing a group of young mothers, she remembers how isolated she felt when Rose was younger, for she found herself unable to fit in with the other mothers. During that time, she sometimes wondered if she was somehow an inadequate homemaker.
Chapter 16 Summary
Katherine and Rose come over to Anna’s house on the night before her flight to Bamana. They wish her well, and Katherine prays for Anna to have a safe and fruitful trip. The following morning, Robert drops her off at the airport. He once again offers to travel with her, but Anna declines. Though she has her fears about traveling to Bamana as a woman alone, she feels that it is important to complete this endeavor on her own. She asks Robert not to contact her while she is traveling.
Anna boards her flight and discovers that Ken is on the same plane. He offers to guide her around Bamana and gives her his business card. During the flight, she rereads her favorite passage from Kofi’s diary, which recounts a conversation he had with Bronwen about children. Although Kofi had no real intentions of having a child with Bronwen, the two of them enjoyed speculating about what their hypothetical child would look like. They imagined a son with Bronwen’s eyes and Kofi’s complexion and mused that “by the time he [came] of age the Diamond Coast and Wales [would] be free” (129).
When the plane lands in Bamana, Adrian is waiting outside to take Anna to her accommodations at the upscale Palace Hotel.
Chapter 17 Summary
Anna and Adrian exchange news on the drive to the hotel. Anna recalls that Adrian was easily convinced to meet her in Bamana. He has arranged for her to meet with Kofi the following Monday. At the Palace Hotel, Anna settles into her suite and makes a video call to Rose. Rose accuses Anna of using the trip to Bamana to avoid beginning divorce proceedings. They argue until Rose hangs up tersely.
Anna recalls that she and Robert often disagreed on how best to raise Rose, whose lighter complexion often causes people to assume that she is a white woman. Robert never wanted to teach Rose about race, preferring her to be “free of adult cares and prejudices” (138). Anna feels that she failed to teach Rose the importance of her diverse heritage. At the age of 13, Rose stated her belief that “we’re all the same” (138) and that “nobody cares” about race. Anna recognizes this cavalier belief as a highly privileged attitude.
Ken joins Anna at the breakfast buffet the following morning. He explains that he is a consultant who specializes in the emerging energy market in Africa, as well as in precious metals and diamonds. Adrian calls to inform Anna that he won’t be able to meet her that day due to a scheduling error. Cautious about venturing into Bamana alone, Anna agrees to accompany Ken to a local beach. There, they flirt and dance with one another. Ken kisses Anna, and they begin to escalate physically but are interrupted. They return to the hotel, and Anna excuses herself to her room, feeling glad that she didn’t sleep with Ken.
At breakfast the following morning, Anna avoids Ken. She goes to the Oxford Street Market alone, where vendors address her as obroni, meaning “white.” Anna has cornrows done by a young Bamanian woman who compliments her “half-caste” hair. This comment makes Anna recall Bronwen’s struggles to take care of it. Looking in the mirror afterward, Anna thinks that she looks “foreign.”
Chapter 18 Summary
As the date of her meeting with Kofi draws closer, Anna explores Bamana with Adrian. Adrian enjoys explaining Bamana’s history, a habit that Anna finds grating because she attributes his overconfidence to his status as a white man in an African country. Admiring the artwork in the Palace Hotel, Anna recalls the failure of her own first exhibition. Through Robert’s connections, she secured a spot in a gallery in Hampstead, but her paintings failed to connect with her audience. She suspects that this is because her art does not fit easily into any niche, and “there is nothing particularly [B]lack about it” (151).
On the morning of the scheduled meeting, Adrian calls to let Anna know that Kofi has moved the meeting to the following Monday. Instead, they take a tour of a former Portuguese fort in Cove Coast, where more than 300,000 enslaved people were once held. Anna is unsettled by the cavalier attitude that some tourists exhibit during the tour. Afterward, she asks Adrian his opinion of the building. Adrian praises its construction and makes a dismissive comment about the edifice’s historic role in enslavement, saying only, “It’s bad, but it’s in the past” (161).
Chapters 13-18 Analysis
In these chapters, Onuzo furthers the theme of Diverse Racial Heritage and the Search for Identity by exploring Anna’s experiences of being raised solely by a white parent whose own discomfort with the issue of race compels her to avoid the topic entirely, to her daughter’s lasting detriment. Although Bronwen’s insistence that Anna is no different from her is a well-intentioned attempt to help her fit into London society, her approach backfires tremendously, for instead of validating the young Anna, it only serves to rob her of “a sense of rightness, a sense of self” (109). Compelled to suppress one half of her identity, Anna is acutely aware that she is considered different by the white majority that surrounds her in London, and that difference profoundly affects the way she moves through the world. By showing the fallout of Bronwen’s choices, Onuzo emphasizes the importance of honoring all aspects of one’s identity and treating racism as the real and present problem that it is.
As Anna’s tense interactions with her own daughter imply, this cycle of identity loss is poised to repeat itself with Rose. Anna worries that she has failed to teach her daughter about all aspects of her identity, instead acquiescing to Robert’s preference that Rose be raised “free of adult cares and prejudices” (138). Onuzo uses this aspect of the story to highlight the reality that Black people, unlike white people, simply do not have the option to be indifferent to the issue of race. Rose can hold a cavalier attitude about race because she is perceived to be a white woman in London society and does not have a realistic conception of how profoundly racism can affect the daily lives of those who are subject to racially motivated acts of hostility and violence. As Anna notes in Chapter 13, people who are born with a sense of belonging “hardly notice” its presence, taking it as their due. Anna, who has been othered all her life, does not have the choice to forget about race, for she sees how powerfully it can affect a multitude of different situations, even in interactions as small as Adrian’s flippant remark that enslavement is “in the past,” (161) which ignores the ongoing legacy of enslavement that still actively affects the people of Bamana.
Anna’s visit to Aunt Caryl also exemplifies the role of the past in forming and maintaining an identity. Aunt Caryl has lost her memory due to Alzheimer’s and no longer remembers her family. Only in brief moments of lucidity does she return to herself and become identifiable as the outspoken woman who once championed the young Anna. This literal representation of losing the past parallels Anna’s distress at never having known her father or her Bamanian heritage, which manifests as a loss of a portion of her identity.
In connection with Anna’s search for identity upon her arrival in Bamana, Onuzo evokes a sense of duality in her interactions with the Bamanian populace, for her encounters are almost a mirror image of her experiences in London. In England, she is considered to be a Black woman, but in Bamana, she is perceived to be either obroni or “half-caste.” Features that once put her at a disadvantage in England, such as her thick curly hair, are praised in Bamana for their proximity to whiteness. Ironically, she is still a minority in both places, standing out when she longs only to fit in. Similarly, Anna’s ambiguous experience while touring the fort exemplifies her uncertainty about her own identity. The tourists are split into two groups; the Bamanian visitors take a more lighthearted approach to the tour, while the Black American and English tourists are solemn and emotionally affected. As a person with both Bamanian and English ancestry, Anna is somewhere in between the two groups. She is unsure exactly how to feel or act, a dilemma that stands as a microcosm of her larger uncertainty about where she belongs in the world. Beset by new experiences and insoluble dilemmas, Anna continues to hope that meeting her father will help her to resolve this internal conflict.
Significantly, the conversation at the Bamana High Commission in Chapter 15 deepens the complexity of Kofi’s character and highlights the recurring issue of Theoretical Politics Versus the Reality of Power. Some Bamanians speak fondly about him, still believing that he was a good leader for their country, while others firmly denounce his more despotic practices. In this scene, Onuzo emphasizes the concept that politics in practice are rarely as clear-cut as they are in theory. The vehemence of those on each side of the debate also imply that despite his many flaws, Kofi is neither the villain nor the hero of Bamana, lying instead somewhere along the spectrum that ranges from good leadership to corruption.
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