Sankofa is a novel of healing and self-discovery for Anna Bain Graham - a biracial, middle-aged housewife dealing with the recent passing of her mother and the collapse of her troubled marriage to a philandering husband. Among her mother’s belongings, she finds a secret diary belonging to her absentee father, an African scholar who briefly boarded with her mother’s family when he was a student in London. After some rather revealing passages, her curiosity is piqued and she summons the courage to research this man that her mother hardly mentioned.

As a child, Anna had imagined a loving, protective father in a faraway place. She believed if he had been there, he would have surely helped her navigate the bullying, racism, and loneliness she experienced as the only child of color in a common Welsh family, mostly white neighborhood, and a London that was not entirely welcoming to those deemed “different.” Her mother was ill-equipped to address the emotional stress, the physical assaults, or even the cultural challenges that befell Anna; so the discovery of the diary propels her to get answers to questions she has withheld for a lifetime from the man himself.

Upon meeting her father - he is nothing like his diary implies or what Anna imagined. Francis Aggey aka Kofi Adjei, a past president of Bamana, a country for whom he helped establish its independence (not without much controversy) from British colonial rule in the 1970s. He warns, “You came to meet a man in the past. There is a mythical bird we have here, Anna. We call it the sankofa. It flies forwards with its head facing back. It’s a poetic image but it cannot work in real life.”

This concept of “looking back while moving forward” is what fuels the many themes and plotlines within the novel. Via flashbacks, it explores the common and conflicting personal histories and heritages of Anna and Kofi, the devastating toll that (British) colonialization excised on African nations, and the polarizing aftereffects of these nations grappling to reinvent themselves amid political games with global rules stacked against them. We see the impact that this has on the young, idealistic Francis and how he morphed into the “radicalized” Kofi. The reader witnesses the rebirth of a defeated Anna as she evolves into an aware and empowered Nana.

I enjoyed taking the journey with Anna and was pulling for her every step of the way. I received a copy of this book from NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review.