Neocolonialism in Haile Gerima's "Sankofa"

Through his film, Sankofa, Haile Gerima hopes to illuminate a highly divisive and transformative era in both African and American history, one shrouded by both time and the reluctance of many to remember it. By plying the murky historical waters of the slave trade in America, a period defined by unspeakable injustice and irrevocable change, Gerima provides insight into the experiences and hardships faced by Africans of all backgrounds and reminds us of the importance of history in understanding our present. The very title of the film, Sankofa, an Akan word meaning "to go back and take," or more interpretively, "one must return to the past to move forward," immediately alludes to the film's preoccupation with one's origins and their importance in defining one's identity. The greatest of Gerima's achievements, however, is that, by embarking on its own sankofa, the film uses the past to explore issues of race, privilege and the many forms of colonization that manage to persist and flourish in an ever-globalizing world.

The crux of the film revolves around the character of Mona, a black American who is not merely one person - in a sense, she represents an entire generation, a people that has lost its way and forgotten its roots in the face of a globalized world. At the film's outset, Mona is introduced as a shallow and ignorant person; she has come to Cape Coast Castle - a major hub of the Atlantic slave trade and a prison to untold numbers of her own ancestors - but seems completely unaware of its ignominious history.

Instead of making a pilgrimage to the site, a potentially revelatory experience for Mona with the capacity to teach her where she came from, she has come for the sole purpose of modeling in a photo shoot. Her domineering white photographer commands her to exude a kind of exoticism and sexuality, and dressed in a Westernized bastardization of traditional African attire, Mona is the perfect icon of the Imperial ideal of the exoticized, eroticized native. She is no longer viewed as human, but something prized for its foreignness and sexuality - an object and a fulfillment of the Imperial urge to control. Indeed, by adhering to American tastes in fashion and glamour, but appearing to be authentically African, Mona fulfills the modern Imperial desire to experience a supposedly genuine taste of other cultures, but without the threat of having one's beliefs challenged or one's sensibilities offended. In this sense, Mona's unquestioning acceptance of her role in devaluing her own heritage renders her no freer than Shola, the slave whose experiences Mona comes to vicariously experience.

Though no longer under direct subjugation by slavery, to this day non-Western nations are subjected to the neocolonial drive to dominate indirectly through more insidious channels - popular culture, fashion and the media. Gerima is clearly conscious of this trend, and the white American photographer's repeated demands for "more sex" from Mona are indicative of the way the Western world has never ceased to capitalize on the non-Western, and the scene is eerily evocative of the sexual abuse Shola suffers later in the film at then hands of her white master. By subjecting Mona to the camera's invasive gaze and demanding "more sex, Mona, more sex," the photographer, and the photo shoot as a whole serves as an allegory for the commercializing, Westernizing forces of neo-Imperial America (in a sense a rape of the culture), and is the modern analogue for the forced adherence by slaves to Western Christian values during the slave trade (a rape of the spirit).

Faced with the raw intensity and violence of the scene in which Shola is whipped for her association with "heathen" (or traditionally African) spirituality, I couldn't help but notice obvious parallels to the movie's opening sequence in which Mona is photographed. As I watched Shola stripped naked, beaten, and forced to swear to her faith in Christ and the Judeo-Christian God, I also watched Gerima's commentary on the modern condition of race relations unfold. Father Raphael, the plantation priest, thrusts his religion upon Shola against her will just as he invasively thrusts his cross (a phallic symbol) into her bosom. Naked, bound and hanging by her wrists, she is forced to affirm her faith even as she is beaten, and the invasiveness of priest's crucifix thrust into Shola's bosom only enhanced my sense that a kind of rape was taking place. The participation in the beating, a procedure performed under the pretenses of helping Shola, by the very master who regularly rapes her establishes a new layer of irony, further revealing the intervention to be nothing more than a cruel, sadistic charade.

While Mona is not physically raped by the photographer, the congruity between the two scenes is apparent in the photographer's fixation with her body; snapping shot after shot of her and chanting for "more sex," he extracts from her what he needs - her exoticism and difference - while inseminating her with the Western values of (and obsessions with) sexuality, fashion, and hollow materialism.

Through this brilliant scenic symmetry, Gerima raises our awareness of the evolving face of colonialism; though many things have changed since the years of the slave trade, in many ways they have remained the same. Rather than subjugation through slavery and forced faith, means formerly employed by missionaries abroad and domestically on plantations, in a globalized world the methods of assimilation are more subtle but no less real. In our globalized world economy, capitalism and the free market have supplanted evangelism and the direct seizure of resources as the prime means of securing exploitative colonial relationships. Rather than entering into costly (and now diplomatically unpopular) military engagements to occupy a weaker nation, superpowers such as the U.S. need only export their popular culture. Just as Great Britain cultivated the smuggling of opium from colonial India into China in the 19th century to increase trade revenues and heighten China's dependence on British trade, so too does the U.S. disseminate its own seeds of cultural dependence.

For instance, I recently viewed a standup routine on Comedy Central by a young black American man that makes light of the trend of cultural colonization by referencing his own experience on a trip to Africa; though I have been unable to find a transcript the routine, the thrust of the joke was that Africans attempt to emulate American styles and come close to succeeding, but not quite (i.e. wearing a stylish FUBU sweatsuit... with black dress shoes and a necktie). While comical and innocuous enough, the routine is indicative of the larger trend of the colonization of the mind, in which Western pop culture and media infect non-Western societies, addictive as opium, and thereby Westernize and whiten them. By analogizing Mona and the subtler, more modern forms of colonial exploitation with Shola and the more audacious and outmoded methods of the slave trade, Gerima reminds us that colonization need not take such obvious manifestations as slavery and forced religious conversion to exist.

A pawn of the neocolonial appetite for exoticism, Mona is rendered artificial. She isn't viewed as truly American by the photographer (or American society, Gerima seems to suggest), but as a symbol of Africa. She is not, however, authentically African (at least not yet). Neither truly American - though she clearly adheres to American values and culture - nor truly African, Mona is caught in a state of personal limbo that Fred D'Aguiar calls, in his Home is Always Elsewhere, "in-betweenness" or "unbelongingness." Like Mintah, the main protagonist of D'Aguiar's novel Feeding the Ghosts, Mona is a stranger to her two homelands "not out of any willfulness of stubbornness, but because she is a stranger to herself" (198). As Mona poses and minces around the castle at the direction of her photographer, painfully oblivious to the implications of her actions, Gerima establishes a grating sense of discord. By juxtaposing the dedication, discipline and tenacity to tradition of the fort's shamanic drummer with the frivolity and overt materialism of Mona and the photographer, it becomes uncomfortably evident that Mona is out of her element in her own homeland.

Though Gerima directs our attention to issues and trends that are overtly negative (the colonization of the mind, the dilution and Westernization of other cultures), the thrust of the film is overtly positive. Through Mona's transformative experience in the Cape Coast Castle dungeon, in which she directly experiences, through a vision, the life of Shola, one of her ancestors and a slave, Gerima reminds us of the importance of remembering where we come from. Only in so doing can we then move forward and find our own place in the world. By the end of the film, Mona experiences her own sankofa, returning to her roots and emerging from the dungeon into unity with her past and present.

While Gerima offers a highly positive view of history and its potential for personal enlightenment, D'Aguiar offers a more mixed interpretation, calling its lessons "salutary only in so far as they remind us of how our ancestors [messed] up and we [messed] up in turn" (201). This is not to say that D'Aguiar swears off history as valueless, but rather that he calls for a different conception of it; only by embracing a less nationalistic, more personal understanding of history and our individual roles within it can we gain anything from it. He summarizes this paradox well in concluding, "I need to forget in order to continue, but I must remember if I am to survive" (202).

It is this central message that charges Sankofa throughout, and that Gerima offers as the only and best antidote to the venom of cultural dissolution and neocolonialism. Just as Mona emerges from the dungeon of her ignorance with a sense of her individual place in history, Gerima reminds us that we too have the potential to obtain unity with our history, painful and unforgivable as so much of it may be, and exist at once in the past and present without discord. Though the closing scene of the film finds Mona watching a sunset, typically symbolic of an ending, it also represents a beginning: the beginning of a better era in which we know both where we came from, and where we are heading.