53 pages • 1 hour read
Sankofa
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Chapters 19-24Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 19 Summary
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes descriptions of racism and features a quotation that obscures the author’s use of the n-word. There is also a description of child abuse and imprisonment.
Anna and Adrian travel to Kofi’s house, a gilded bungalow in a wealthy and isolated neighborhood of Segu. Kofi himself welcomes them in for breakfast; Anna notes his confident posture and posh English accent. Kofi and Adrian discuss African politics. Adrian mentions that the new president of Rwanda is a dictator, but Kofi, who hopes to make an ally of the president, reports that “perspective is everything” (165).
Kofi turns to Anna and asks what has brought her to Bamana. Anna cautiously tells him about her mother’s identity and the diary she discovered. Kofi angrily denies the possibility that he is her father. He takes the diary from her, claiming that it must be a forgery by Bronwen, and abruptly kicks Anna and Adrian out of his house. Returning to her hotel room, Anna is overwhelmed by grief. She vomits, then breaks down crying.
Chapter 20 Summary
In the days after Kofi’s rejection, Anna ignores Adrian’s calls. When Rose calls to ask about the outcome of the meeting, Anna lies and claims that it went well; she also continues to conceal Kofi’s real identity. Rose once again pushes her to go through with divorce proceedings, and Anna realizes that Rose is seeking a sense of closure for herself rather than looking out for Anna’s best interests.
On her final day in Bamana, Adrian meets Anna at the Palace Hotel to discuss their return to the UK. Suddenly, their conversation is interrupted by the arrival of Kofi’s right-hand man, Sule. Kofi wants to meet with Anna again and is willing to extend her visa so that she can stay in Bamana. Adrian cautions Anna against accepting, warning her that she will be putting herself under Kofi’s total control. Ignoring his warning, Anna decides to stay.
Chapter 21 Summary
To remain in Bamana without having to submit her British passport for a visa extension, Anna accepts Bamanian citizenship. She builds up her confidence and begins venturing further and further from the Palace Hotel on her own, aware that she is searching for a nonexistent event that will turn her “from an outsider to an insider” (176). One day, Sule drives Anna to another of Kofi’s properties. This time, Anna speaks frankly and confidently to Kofi. He admits that he had a DNA test conducted using the glass she drank from at their previous meeting; as a result, he now knows that she is truly his daughter. He says that if he had known Bronwen was pregnant, he would never have left Anna to be raised in a “savage country” where “Black men were treated like animals” (179). He tells her that when he returned to England as a prime minister, the difference in the way he was treated was so extreme that he felt he was in a new country.
Anna asks why Kofi never contacted Bronwen, and he replies that he never expected a white woman like her to wait around for him while he was in jail. Furthermore, Bronwen would have been ostracized by Kofi’s circle if he had returned to Bamana with her. He tells Anna about his African family, which consists of a wife and four children. At the conclusion of their meeting, Kofi encourages Anna to question the negative press she has read about him and to remember that each story has two sides. He holds onto the diary but agrees to return it to her when he has finished reading it.
Chapter 22 Summary
Early the following morning, Kofi invites Anna to join him on a visit to his country home in Gbadolite. Anna boards a private plane. On the way, she reads a magazine featuring a plus-sized Black woman on the cover; this detail makes her recall that a modeling agent scouted Rose when the girl was 15. Anna took Rose to several castings, but during the final round of casting for a major label, one of the fellow models pointed out Rose’s muscular calves and said, “Her legs are n****r big” (188). Anna wonders if this incident is partially to blame for the fact that Rose later developed an eating disorder.
Kofi takes Anna to the Gbadolite zoo, where they watch the crocodiles being fed live chickens. He tells her that crocodiles are a symbol of his village; in his hometown, many men proudly wear the nickname of “Crocodile” (190). Kofi’s Gbadolite property is a sprawling, gilded mansion styled after the Palace of Versailles. Anna is initially awed but soon comes to view the opulence as a tacky embodiment of the very “Western dominance” that Francis Aggrey so ardently rejected in his diary entries.
Chapter 23 Summary
The following morning, Anna watches Kofi preside over a local village. The villagers react to his presence with reverence, which makes Anna proud; she has never seen a Black man presented so positively in the public eye. She considers painting the scene of Kofi presiding over the adoring crowd. A woman approaches Anna and introduces herself as Marcellina Kote. She works for a children’s rights group called Bright Futures. Marcellina believes Anna to be a reporter that Kofi has hired and refers to his frequent habit of flying in outside reporters to write positive pieces about him. She asks if Anna knows about the rumors that he fed his enemies to the crocodiles in the Gbadolite zoo. Anna takes Marcellina’s business card and agrees to be shown around later.
That night, Anna meets Marcellina under the pretense that she is a reporter collecting information for an article on Gbadolite. Marcellina takes her deep into the village, to a house where a nine-year-old girl named Abena is chained to a wall. Her captor is her uncle; he believes that Abena’s birth is the reason why his business is failing. Horrified, Anna admits that she is not a journalist and cannot do anything to help the situation. Marcellina takes Anna to a bar. As they discuss Kofi, Marcellina admits that he has done some good for Bamana by freeing the country from colonialism. Her parents’ generation adores him, bestowing him with the complimentary nickname Daasebre. To the younger generation, however, his name is synonymous with corruption and the murders of the Kinnakro Five. Surveying the bar, Anna realizes that she is by far the wealthiest person there. For the first time in her life, she feels rich. Sule is waiting for Anna when she returns to the hotel. He demands to know where she was and advises her to tell him whenever she plans to go out in the future.
Chapter 24 Summary
The following morning, Marcellina texts to inform Anna that she freed Abena herself. Anna feels ill at ease in Gbadolite with her new knowledge of its more violent aspects. She heads to the Gbadolite library, where she is confronted by Afua, one of Kofi’s daughters. Believing Anna to be a sex worker that Kofi has hired, Afua orders her to leave Gbadolite immediately. Kofi arrives at the library and chastens Afua. He breaks the news that Anna is her half-sister. Afua is horrified to learn that she has a sibling whose mother was a white woman, and she storms out in anger. Kofi tells Anna that they were photographed while riding through Gbadolite together, and the photo has been circulated on several political blogs without context.
Kofi and Anna take a boat out on local Lake Makgadi. Kofi says that if he were present at Anna’s birth, he would have named her Nana, a word of Ghanian origin which means “queen.” He speculates on how different Anna’s life would have been if she were raised as Nana; she would have learned the folktales passed down from her Bamanian ancestors and would have taken part in initiation rites at the age of 13 like his other daughters. Kofi asks Anna how Kofi Adjei compares to Francis Aggrey. Anna replies that she identified with Francis, who was an outsider. Kofi, on the other hand, is “used to being worshipped” (214). She asks why Bamanian citizens remain so poor when Bamana has access to diamond mines. Kofi explains that the diamonds still belong to European companies, and that nationalizing resources is harder than it seems. When Anna asks why Kofi doesn’t do something to stop the abuse of children like Abena, Kofi merely replies that change happens slowly.
Anna attends dinner with Kofi and Afua. She again expresses her desire to return to London and see Rose; Kofi counters that she should bring Rose to Bamana. Anna and Afua get into an argument about Kofi’s legacy, with Afua emphasizing the good things that her father has done and Anna pointing out Kofi’s failure to empower his citizens. When Anna asks about the Kinnakro Five, Kofi accuses her of speaking to his enemies, and he and Afua leave the table. Anna finishes her dinner alone.
Chapters 19-24 Analysis
When Anna finally meets her father, the sense of belonging that she hoped to find is denied to her once again, for Kofi reacts to her claims of kinship with cold rejection and even outrage. In this moment, Anna must renounce her idealistic visions of the young man who wrote inspiring diary entries, for the passionate and altruistic student she admired sits before her now as an untouchably wealthy man who has been corrupted by his rise to power. The intensity of Anna’s physical reaction to this meeting emphasizes how profoundly he has disappointed her, for she has pinned all of her hopes of gaining a sense of belonging and closure upon this initial visit.
Additionally, Anna continues to find her search for identity to be challenging at best, for even after Kofi accepts her as his daughter, she does not fit in with her new family. Whereas Anna is used to being the outcast, Kofi’s African family is accustomed to occupying a position of power and high status in the surrounding community. Ironically, although Anna is drawn to Bamana by her shared sense of isolation with the young Francis, she is unable to connect with the arrogant Kofi on the same level. Despite this ongoing cognitive dissonance, however, she still finds herself following him around Bamana in her search for answers to the questions that underlie her Diverse Racial Heritage and the Search for Identity. The past has a strong hold on Anna in general, for she often finds herself reflecting on her relationship with Bronwen and wondering how her life would have been different if Kofi had been present in her life. Although this fixation is a logical one, lamenting what might have been does not aid Anna in her search for clarity and belonging. No amount of speculation will undo the traumas Anna experienced as a child or turn Kofi Adjei back into Francis Aggrey. To move forward into a viable future, Anna will first need to make peace with the past.
In these chapters, Onuzo highlights several differences between Francis and Kofi’s experiences of power. Whereas Francis was an outsider like Anna, Kofi is “used to being worshipped” (214). Onuzo therefore evokes the motif of duality to contrast key aspects of the young Francis with his current identity of Kofi. Although Francis was powerless against the racist landlords of London who denied him lodging, Kofi has several gilded properties scattered across Bamana, and although Francis was accosted in London just for being as a Black man, Kofi is “regal and beloved” (193) within the context of Bamana. His excessive accumulation of wealth and power may therefore be seen as a method of coping with the dehumanization that he endured as a young man.
Anna experiences how differently race and power function in Bamana when she finds herself benefiting from her proximity to whiteness and her connection to the influential Adjeis. Marcellina, who views Anna as a white woman from an affluent foreign country, is sure that she will be able to do something to help the imprisoned child, Abena, despite Anna’s protestations that she is not a reporter. Thus, Anna comes to realize that she is in a sense both powerful and powerless; while she has greater access to resources than most citizens of Bamana do, she is unable to singlehandedly reverse the systemic misogyny that harms girls like Abena. This contrast highlights the fact that even though a multitude of factors can increase an individual’s social power, large-scale patterns of oppression and discrimination are not so easily changed. Similarly, the endurance of harmful power structures becomes an issue again during the Gbadolite trip, furthering the theme of Theoretical Politics Versus the Reality of Power. As Kofi proudly shows off his gilded mansion and the infrastructure that his government helped to build, Anna witnesses how some people in the local villages treat him like a savior figure; however, Marcellina’s more realistic attitude provides a contrast to this trend, for although she acknowledges the progress that Kofi has achieved, she condemns his negligent handling of the human-rights abuses that continue to take place in Bamana.
When Anna brings up Marcellina’s criticisms, Kofi points out that five centuries of oppression cannot be erased in three decades, and his response highlights the difficulty of fully liberating and empowering a country that is still hindered by its residual colonial ties. Even among liberated African countries, the scars of colonialism have created deep divisions that prevent them from working together easily, and although the role of Kofi’s own decisions cannot be discounted, this interaction establishes that his approach to governing was not the only factor in his failure to uplift Bamana. The conversation doesn’t change Anna’s mind, but it does help her begin to process the seeming contradiction between Kofi’s visionary idealism as a young man and the reality of his leadership.
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