This very new book (it came out only a couple of months ago) is the third by Nigerian writer Chibundu Onuzo.

I really liked it. The clear, conversational style lends itself beautifully to audiobook format, and the reader, Sara Powell, was superb, with a perfect ear for dialogue and for the various accents.

The story's "I" is Anna Graham, nee Anna Bain, a late-40s, biracial woman living in Britain (I'm acutely aware that terms like "biracial" are problematic, as these sources vividly explain, but as Anna's mother is white and her unknown father black, and the story revolves around her quest to locate her identity, "biracial" seems the best descriptor).

Anna's life seems to have rolled into a siding. Her mother has died; she's in the process of divorcing her husband (adultery -- his); and her daughter is busy with her career. Anna studied architecture at university, but she didn't practise for long (another casualty of the demands of domesticity). She paints, but has never made inroads commercially. Her work, some felt, was not "black" enough...

So we have a picture of a fairly passive woman, somehow at the receiving end of life rather than an active instigator in it.


Cote d'Ivoire, 1997-98

Then she discovers, among her late mother's possessions, a diary written by the father she never knew. Francis Aggrey, as he was then, came from the (fictional) "Diamond Coast", in West Africa, to study in London, where he became romantically involved with Anna's mother. He was called home before finishing his degree, or knowing that he had fathered a child.

Anna is brought up by her Welsh single mum, Bronwen, who is a hard worker, provides well for her child, and stands up for her when she is discriminated against at school. But somehow Bronwen never gets what it means to be biracial. She insists that Anna is "just the same as me" -- even though she can't even cope with her daughter's hair. "It was her lie," says Anna, "her special fantasy."

This has obviously left a yawning -- if long subliminal -- identity gap in Anna's life, and the thought that she might be able to trace her father (over whom Bronwen had drawn a total veil of secrecy) totally galvanizes her.

Some feverish research reveals that Francis Aggrey -- at some point transformed into Kofi Adjei -- became a resistance fighter back in his home country, was gaoled, and on independence, became the president of the country, now known as "Bamana". In power for an unholy number of years, he eventually stepped down, but is still an authority figure in his country.

Aided by a university researcher who knew her father, Anna sets off for Bamana to try to make contact.



I guess you could say there's a lot here that's contrived. What are the chances of any of this happening, you might ask yourself. But it's not so far beyond the bounds of possibility as to be wholly incredible (this reviewer, for example, had a similar experience of locating her Nigerian father -- a government minister in Nigeria, who died young -- through his letters); and the framework allows Onuzo to explore a number of interesting and inter-related questions:

Can Anna -- who has been brought up entirely in Britain, has travelled little, and in Bamana is perceived as white, an "obroni" -- ever feel at home in a country that is so very different? What happened to change the idealistic Francis into the rich and tyrannical Kofi? And can Anna stop idolizing the former long enough to come to terms with the latter? How, anyway, do you judge the performance of rulers who had to start from scratch after colonialism? And how, in any era, do you balance the demands of "progress" and "tradition"? As Jane Link argues, Onuzo, while pulling absolutely no punches about Kofi's career in office, is also concerned to paint a rounded picture of "a president, father, and man simply doing his best, [thereby] making space for the voice of a colonial generation who see a liberator where others see a dictator".

Most of all, can Anna finally learn to bring together the two elements of her identity without discomfort? At one point she tells her father what happened when she joined the Afro-Caribbean society at university: "They said I talked like a white person, thought like one and worst of all, I danced white." He affirms that she is not white. Yet later, angry with Anna for questioning him about his riches and his political track record, he snaps back: "You are my daughter, but at the end of the day you are still an obroni." Later, he reacts to another bit of criticism with the dismissive comment: "It is the obroni way -- to always find African attempts wanting."

Zahra Banday draws attention to the irony that even parents will try to create boxes for their biracial children, attempting to determine "how much of one race you are compared to the other, which given name you most embody, where your heritage really is as opposed to where it is not, and, finally, where your allegiances will come down".

These are rich and complex themes to explore in the context of a conversational-style first-person narrative. It's quite a feat to have pulled it off so unfalteringly.



A couple of times -- when a local activist takes Anna to see a child who has been chained up on charges of witchcraft; or when, on her way back to England, she gets arrested at the airport, and put in gaol for a night; or when she is "initiated" into womanhood by Wuyo Ama, a wise woman whom Kofi knows from his days of fighting in the bush -- you think, oh no, this is going to veer off into African stereotype. But it doesn't. The child is rescued, not by an outsider but by the activist herself. The arrest (I guessed it) was engineered by her father, whose intense resentment at her outspokenness ultimately -- in Big Man style -- cannot resist the temptation to give her a taste of hard power. And the vision Anna experiences with the wise woman (open to rational explanation through her inhalation of the smoke from the burning herbs) is actually rather beautiful.

By the end, Anna is still squaring off with her father. She is still refusing him the approval he somehow seems to seek from her. She is still nostalgic for the idealistic young man who courted her mother. But she is drawn to him, drawn to the idea of ancestry and belonging. She has been shaken out of her low-key British discomfort, where everyone seems a self-appointed fount of easy answers, and placed in a situation where everything is a curiosity and a challenge and an impossible conundrum. She was the ghost of a woman, and now she's starting to forge a unique identity. She was a grey shadow, and now she's starting to emerge in real colour. She decides to stay longer, and you feel very glad about that. 



The title, Sankofa, refers to a mythical bird. Towards the end of the book, Kofi explains: "It flies forward with its head facing back. It's a poetic image but it can't work in real life." But Onuzo herself frames the symbolism more positively: "Before you move forward you need to know what’s in your past... -- moving forward but not forgetting where you come from." Link glosses it like this: "[The book] captures the spirit of the Akan word sankofa, meaning retrieval, or more literally, 'it is not taboo to fetch what is at risk of being left behind'." Looking back, moving forward: this encapsulates Anna's story.

"Banama" is an intriguing amalgam of West/Central African place names and themes. Many elements were reminiscent of our short period working in Cote d'Ivoire (although Banama was a British colony, not a French one). "Gbadolite" reminded me of Yamoussoukro. Reference is made to Akan culture, and specifically, the Fante people and language (my Ghanaian friend Mercy's heritage). Anna constantly mentions colour, and that is my abiding memory of our time there too.

I think Sankofa's main fault is that it tries to do a little too much. Too many characters translate into an excess of once-over-lightly sketching. We briefly meet Catherine, the helpful neighbour, who's maybe just that bit too keen to invite Anna to church; Adrian, the former-"spy"-turned-scholar; Ken, the consultant and old Africa hand, who is initially ubiquitous and comes across as vaguely predatory, but then just fades away; Rose, the daughter, whose busy career masks an eating disorder; Aunt Carol, Bronwen's sister, who has dementia... There are too many to have the remotest chance of being rounded out.

But you end up forgiving all that because the main themes are so powerful.

Onuzo was born in Lagos, Nigeria, in 1991, and moved to England at the age of 14. She went to school in Winchester, and to university in London. In addition to having three novels to her credit, she has also already gained a PhD. Oh, and she is a singer/musician, and believes that if films can have soundtracks, so can books. This is the "official single" for Sankofa. Enjoy.