Of all the Yoruba / Nigerian concepts that have crossed into English usage, Àṣà has had perhaps the strangest journey. Àṣà in a Founder's First Year? The journey itself is part of the answer. To understand Àṣà now, you have to understand both the original and the diasporic version, and the gap between them.
What Àṣà Actually Means
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? This much is on Wikipedia and in introductory leadership books. What is harder to find — and harder to translate — is the texture of the concept: the way Àṣà shapes a thousand small daily choices in a Yoruba / Nigerian household, and how those choices accumulate into a different shape of life.
Customs are the spice of life.Yoruba
The Question This Post Is About
A composite story of an early-stage founder learning Àṣà the hard way. 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.
Take a small, ordinary case. A team of nine. A project that was supposed to take a quarter is now in its second. The manager has the option to find a single person to assign blame to and to move on. The Àṣà reading offers a different question: what did we, as a team, fail to make possible for the person carrying this work? Cultural practices brought by employees from elsewhere are welcomed into the calendar, not flattened. The case is not unusual. The reading of it, in the spirit of Àṣà, is.
A Second Angle
Notice what the case is not asking. It is not asking who is to blame. It is not asking how to make the situation more efficient. It is asking what Àṣà would have us do here, with these particular people, in this particular knot. Cultural practices brought by employees from elsewhere are welcomed into the calendar, not flattened. The discipline of asking the Àṣà question — instead of the efficiency question, or the blame question — is what changes a working life over years.
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.