SANKOFA....WHY SLAVERY GOD?
In "Sankofa," a contemporary African-American woman travels back in time and experiences slavery. Haile Gerima's poetic and precisely detailed film takes its audience into its heroine's life and mind as her moral sense is challenged and changed. No viewer can avoid the discomforting questions the film so eloquently raises.
The opening sequences, set and filmed in Ghana, are alternately seductive and off-putting. Among drums and chants, a voice invokes ancestral ghosts. "Spirit of the dead, rise up," the voice says, "and claim your story." The film's title is a West African term meaning to reclaim the past in order to go forward, and "Sankofa" stumbles only in its depiction of the present.
Mona is a young model first seen posing for a callous white photographer on a beach. She is dressed in a pseudo-Tina Turner getup complete with blonde wig. This is a heavy-handed way of showing that she has lost her connection to her past, that slavery still shapes her life as she is enslaved by contemporary images.
But the film soon moves on, convincingly, to a surreal experience. Mona wanders into a dungeon, a holding place from which slaves were shipped to the United States. She has walked into the past, where she is stripped, chained and beaten. Suddenly she is on a plantation, a house slave called Shola, with no memory of Mona or the 20th century.
The longest and finest part of "Sankofa" is its depiction of the daily life of the slaves and the way witnessing its brutality changes Shola. She falls in love with a rebellious field slave, who urges her to poison her white owners. Shola refuses. Though the master rapes her at will, she believes killing is wrong, no matter what injustice has been done to her.
But Shola soon sees a pregnant runaway slave beaten to death, her living child taken from her body. And she idolizes Nunu, a strong and motherly slave who has joined the rebels.
Nunu's son, Joe, is the head slave, who has an easier life and seems to have turned against his own people. He is blue-eyed and in the thrall of the white priest, and his story should have been as compelling as Shola's. But his character is less convincing, partly because his tortured sense of identity is so often depicted by sudden mood swings and glances at paintings of white Madonnas in church.
Shola, however, (played with great strength by Oyafunmike Ogunlano) carries the audience into the heart of her experience. When she lifts a machete over a sleeping white overseer, the film has led its viewers to a place where either choice -- to kill or not -- might be justified. "Sankofa" asks its audience to enter a different moral universe, one that slavery created.
There are some nude and rape scenes. So if your faint at heart or the Aunt Esther type please beware. Slavery and all that it entails is very ugly at times, but the truth most be told. This isn't a happy slave movie like the movie "roots" that white folx could see our story from, but a very brutal and telling of how slaves were treated from the Ghana country of Africa to the shores of Jamaica and America.
So the question begs to ask, WHY DID GOD ALLOW SLAVERY? And WHY WERE WE AS A REMANT TAKEN,WHILE OTHERS WEREN'T? SHOULD WE BE GRATEFUL THAT WE WERE TAKEN AS SLAVES AND NOW ENJOY THE "COMFORTS" OF AMERICA? WHAT IS OUR RESPONSIBILITY IF ANY NOW TOWARDS AFRICA? WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? WHERE IN GOD'S WORD DOES IT SPEAK ABOUT OUR COLLECTIVE CHATTEL SLAVERY?
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5 (play close attention to the "priest" who is supposed to represent a "godly man")
Part 6
After watching all 5 movie clips, what does your spirit tell you? Does the word reconciliation have another meaning as well? How do you perceive Africa? Do you really feel at home in America as an African? What is our responsibility as African Americans towards our brothers and sisters living in Africa? Why do you believe God had our people experience the horrors of slavery? What story in the Bible, in the Old Testament that speaks to our experience as slaves?
What say you?
The opening sequences, set and filmed in Ghana, are alternately seductive and off-putting. Among drums and chants, a voice invokes ancestral ghosts. "Spirit of the dead, rise up," the voice says, "and claim your story." The film's title is a West African term meaning to reclaim the past in order to go forward, and "Sankofa" stumbles only in its depiction of the present.
Mona is a young model first seen posing for a callous white photographer on a beach. She is dressed in a pseudo-Tina Turner getup complete with blonde wig. This is a heavy-handed way of showing that she has lost her connection to her past, that slavery still shapes her life as she is enslaved by contemporary images.
But the film soon moves on, convincingly, to a surreal experience. Mona wanders into a dungeon, a holding place from which slaves were shipped to the United States. She has walked into the past, where she is stripped, chained and beaten. Suddenly she is on a plantation, a house slave called Shola, with no memory of Mona or the 20th century.
The longest and finest part of "Sankofa" is its depiction of the daily life of the slaves and the way witnessing its brutality changes Shola. She falls in love with a rebellious field slave, who urges her to poison her white owners. Shola refuses. Though the master rapes her at will, she believes killing is wrong, no matter what injustice has been done to her.
But Shola soon sees a pregnant runaway slave beaten to death, her living child taken from her body. And she idolizes Nunu, a strong and motherly slave who has joined the rebels.
Nunu's son, Joe, is the head slave, who has an easier life and seems to have turned against his own people. He is blue-eyed and in the thrall of the white priest, and his story should have been as compelling as Shola's. But his character is less convincing, partly because his tortured sense of identity is so often depicted by sudden mood swings and glances at paintings of white Madonnas in church.
Shola, however, (played with great strength by Oyafunmike Ogunlano) carries the audience into the heart of her experience. When she lifts a machete over a sleeping white overseer, the film has led its viewers to a place where either choice -- to kill or not -- might be justified. "Sankofa" asks its audience to enter a different moral universe, one that slavery created.
There are some nude and rape scenes. So if your faint at heart or the Aunt Esther type please beware. Slavery and all that it entails is very ugly at times, but the truth most be told. This isn't a happy slave movie like the movie "roots" that white folx could see our story from, but a very brutal and telling of how slaves were treated from the Ghana country of Africa to the shores of Jamaica and America.
So the question begs to ask, WHY DID GOD ALLOW SLAVERY? And WHY WERE WE AS A REMANT TAKEN,WHILE OTHERS WEREN'T? SHOULD WE BE GRATEFUL THAT WE WERE TAKEN AS SLAVES AND NOW ENJOY THE "COMFORTS" OF AMERICA? WHAT IS OUR RESPONSIBILITY IF ANY NOW TOWARDS AFRICA? WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? WHERE IN GOD'S WORD DOES IT SPEAK ABOUT OUR COLLECTIVE CHATTEL SLAVERY?
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5 (play close attention to the "priest" who is supposed to represent a "godly man")
Part 6
After watching all 5 movie clips, what does your spirit tell you? Does the word reconciliation have another meaning as well? How do you perceive Africa? Do you really feel at home in America as an African? What is our responsibility as African Americans towards our brothers and sisters living in Africa? Why do you believe God had our people experience the horrors of slavery? What story in the Bible, in the Old Testament that speaks to our experience as slaves?
What say you?
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by John on
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To me just read Deutoronomy 28 to get the message for disobedience and obedience. Then who are the true Jews/Hebrew/Israelites?
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Permalink Reply by James Pierce on
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John,
Good to see you brother. Who are the true Hebrews? Well, the Lemba Tribe of Africa are the only ones that have been DNA tested and proven to be of the tribe of Levi. So, they are the only ones that are considered "true" Israelites. As far as spiritual, them that keep Torah, and place their faith in Yeshuah, are true Hebrews.
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Always good to see and hear from you Brother James. Thanks on the Lemba Tribe. I wonder if any other people have been tested by DNA? God bless.
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John,
That is an awesome question. I asked the same question man. No other people have been DNA tested and proven. The majority of Israelis in Israel are European, and none of them have been DNA tested and proven to be of Hebrew blood. I wonder why though?
Ethiopians have been tested, but they only have been proven to be from Yemenite origins. Only 0.5% have been proven to be of the tribe of Levi I believe(could be wrong). On the larger scale, the Lemba Tribe are the only ones that have a large count of DNA from Moses & Aaron, and the tribe of Levi.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OtDHkwYXI6k
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