Most of what is written about Àṣà in English is wrong. Not maliciously — usually it is wrong because Àṣà resists translation, because the concept does not match neatly onto Western categories, because the writers are working with a sentence-long summary instead of a tradition. Àṣà and Customer Experience? This essay is one attempt at a more careful answer.
What Àṣà Actually Means
The most commonly cited definition: Àṣà is a Yoruba word for tradition, custom, or culture — but with a particular emphasis. Unlike a Western reading of 'tradition' as fixed inheritance, àṣà names tradition as practice — the continuous, adaptive doing of what has been found to work. It includes language, ritual, food, dress, courtesy, and the unspoken protocols of community life. It is the answer to the question: what do we keep doing, even as everything changes? That sentence is true, as far as it goes. It is also incomplete. Àṣà is held inside a wider Yoruba grammar — a set of related concepts, social practices, and proverbs — that the standalone definition cannot carry.
Customs are the spice of life.Yoruba
The Question This Post Is About
How Àṣà reframes the customer relationship from transaction to relationship. The question is worth taking seriously, because Àṣà is one of those concepts that loses its shape when handled carelessly — and recovers it as soon as the reader is willing to slow down and listen.
There is a specific application of Àṣà that managers rediscover every few years and act surprised to find: the practice of asking, before any consequential decision, who has not yet been heard from. The question seems procedural. It is not. It is a small Àṣà act, repeated, that changes the temperature of an organisation over years. Onboarding includes the company's living traditions, not only its policies.
A Second Angle
For the person living far from Nigeria, West Africa — in a city of strangers, in a flat of one, in a job that has nothing to do with the village they came from — Àṣà can feel like it belongs to someone else's life. It does not. The diasporic reading of Àṣà is not a watered-down version. It is a different test of the same idea. Onboarding includes the company's living traditions, not only its policies.
Where the Concept Resists
There is a real risk in romanticising Àṣà. The Yoruba / Nigerian traditions that produced it have always also produced internal critics — voices warning against the misuse of communal philosophy to demand conformity, to silence the young, to protect bad behaviour by elders. The honest defender of Àṣà keeps those critics at the table.
What to Do With This
If you are new to Àṣà, the most useful place to start is not with a study or a course but with a question, asked of yourself, at the end of an ordinary day: who held me up today, and whom did I hold? Sit with the answer. Do not improve it yet. The concept will deepen on its own, repeated, over weeks. This is how Àṣà actually enters a life.