Abstract
Haile Gerima’s Sankofa (1993) provided a good example for the study of Public History in film that is, the study of how history is presented and recreated for public consumption. In Sankofa, the running thread is the direction that the film provides for a grasp of the past in order to live with confidence in the present and plan for the future. Gerima, originally from Ethiopia, chronicles the Middle Passage and the horrors of trans-Atlantic slavery (the African Holocaust); in the process, he pays homage to the spirits of those who died during the crossing and by the same token, pays tribute to the black and African Diaspora of the Americas. Sankofa is a story of pain, resistance to plantation brutality, tragedy, death, suffering but also, of freedom, redemption, healing and re-discovery. The narrative resorts to oral history and to drumming. Gerima gives centra: I place to the sacred (the bird) as the latter is in contraposition to the loss of memory and language of the transplanted Africans in the New World. The film Sankofa is fictionalized, hence the interest in the relation it entertains with history.
Keywords: Freedom, redemption, healing, Haile Gerima
