I started writing Sankofa the same year I began my PhD on the West African Students’ Union (WASU). I was twenty-four and my first novel had been published to critical but not commercial success. I was not sure how I would earn a living from writing novels and so I decided to start a Phd on the WASU, hoping it would lead to an academic job at the end.
Founded in 1925 in London, the WASU served as an incubator for West African nationalist politics. Its members came to England to study law, engineering and music but ended up dreaming of a future when British West Africa would be free from imperial rule. Its most famous members included Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe, the first President of Nigeria, and Dr Kwame Nkrumah, the first Prime Minister of Ghana.
To research the WASU, I spent my days in archives in London, Lagos and Accra. It was both fascinating and deadly dull. In the archives, I would find anything from the WASU’s monthly accounts, to photographs taken of the group. In one photograph taken at a WASU dinner, the mostly male members sat around a long table. They were all formally dressed: suit and tie, pocket square, polished leather shoes. A few turned to face the camera. They did not smile. Instead, they stared at the lens, challenging the viewer.
What if one of these men had an affair with a white woman? What if she got pregnant? What if this WASU member went back home to West Africa and was never seen or heard from again? What if he ended up being the first Prime Minister of his country?
The inspiration for Sankofa didn’t happen as neatly as those questions laid out but it happened.
My novel is named after the Sankofa, a mythical bird of the Akan people in West Africa. The Sankofa flies forward with its head facing backwards, carrying an egg in its beak. The Sankofa understands that there is no future without reckoning with the past.
In writing this novel, I wanted to answer questions that the historical sources were silent on. For example, the Ghanaian politician Joe Appiah, in his memoirs, boasted of finding young Kwame Nkrumah a white girlfriend while they were both students in London. In 1945, when Nkrumah moved to England from America for further studies, he was allegedly shy around white women after coming from a US where interracial relationships were still illegal in some states. Appiah took it upon himself to diversify Nkrumah’s dating history. According to Appiah, he succeeded in finding Nkrumah a white girlfriend. End of story. The memoir moved on to more political matters.
But all I wanted to know was: WHAT HAPPENED NEXT?! Where did they go on their first date? Did the restaurant welcome them or turn them away, as sometimes happened to black diners in London at the time? Did Nkrumah ever cook West African food for her? Was it jollof rice? Joe Appiah did not even think to address any of these questions in his memoirs. He was more interested in the political speeches they made and the British MPs they befriended.
While I was writing Sankofa, I met people in real life who had similar stories to Anna Graham, my protagonist. In many cases, their fathers had come to England from West Africa as students and always intended to return home after their studies, regardless of any relationships they had with white British women. Some of these men knew they left behind pregnant women, but others did not. However, none of the people I met had fathers who ended up becoming Prime Ministers or Presidents. That detail, I made up all by myself.
Doing a PhD is a curious thing. You spend years gathering research, travelling from archive to archive, trawling through letters and speeches, in order to write a ninety-thousand-word book that only five people will read. At the end of it, you’re an expert but nobody has heard of what you’re an expert of.
I wanted the stories I’d come across to reach a wider audience, not lie buried in a University library. Although inspired by the West African Students’ Union, SANKOFA is not a novel about the WASU. It is a novel about Anna Graham, a woman trying to find herself by searching for her father. It is a novel about Anna’s father, Kofi Adjei, a man who began life as an idealist but ended up a dictator, some say. It is a novel about a woman who reaches middle age before setting off on the biggest adventure of her life. It’s a novel about walking forward into the future, without forgetting what is in your past.
