Post Punk Kitchen Forum

I'm taking a humanities class and I have to write a paper about "Sunjata: A West African Epic of the Mande Peoples." We breezed through the book, which is not an easy read. Call me stupid, but I don't understand the instructions and how to get going here. We're supposed to write an analytical paper focusing on the character Sunjata from when he first appears in the middle of the epic until the end. We're supposed to make both a macro and micro assessment (?) and should substantiate our assessment with collaborating textual data or other sources (?). We have to state a thesis and support it.

I don't understand what assessment we're supposed to make and how we're supposed to make a thesis about this book. At 3 pages, it's not long, it's just hard for me to figure it out.