Sankofa

SANKOFA: BORN EQUAL ONLY is a fresh take on gender and race inequity told from alternating perspectives of rival fraternal twins, Toomi and Ras, birthed to be the Guardians of the River's Child, the first Queen to rise to the throne in the kingdom of Axindar in a post-apocalyptic Africa. The world has become hostile to all life; past disasters have rendered it unlivable; only enhanced life forms survive on the African continent, split between powerful warring kingdoms, all of them competing for the domination of Axindar; where the last river source remains guarded behind its mighty walls; and its protector: The River's Child. Her birth has galvanized the deeply patriarchal kingdoms of the south under king Culumbra and his smoky warriors; in cahoots with Acab Essaat, a high-caste Guardian of the Fire in Axindar, who is intent on ending the abominable new world of low-castes. When the Acab begins to hunt down the hidden Guardians of the River's Child soon after their birth; the twins, barely escape the gruesome murder of their parents and the massacre of their people, fleeing their settlement, only to be captured and sold separately as child-slaves. Torn apart and reeling from their devastation and loss, the twins will set out to reunite; dreaming of the end of warfare, and of a future together; even as they rise as avenging warriors hell-bent on destroying the very kingdom they were birthed to protect. Meanwhile, the abandoned River's Child, able to experience the brutal world through her Sankofa bird, suffers from a debilitating depression which leads to her addiction to a potent drug that takes over her mind as she struggles to make sense of her connection to all life, with visions of the past, the present, and the coming end of the new world in the near future. If the River's Child and her Guardians do not rise from their personal battles to come together in time; the collapse of the new world and the end of all life is imminent.