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 in the Twenty-First Century? This essay is one attempt at a more careful answer.
What Àṣà Actually Means
Let me give the canonical definition first, then try to do a little better. 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? The canonical version is correct but tame. The full version of Àṣà is less polite, more demanding, and more interesting. It does not flatter the reader who has just discovered it.
A tree without roots cannot stand a storm.Yoruba
The Question This Post Is About
What Àṣà looks like now — in cities, online, and in workplaces far from Nigeria, West Africa. 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.
The most concrete way Àṣà shows up in working life is in how a manager handles failure. The Western reflex is to find the responsible individual, document the failure, and move on. Àṣà insists on a slower, harder question first: what did the team make possible, and what did it fail to prevent? The shift sounds soft. It is not. Long-running traditions are audited every few years for whether they still serve their purpose.
A Second Angle
Take the modern workplace as a test case. The dominant Western model treats the team as a coalition of individual contributors who happen to share a Slack channel — each evaluated alone, promoted alone, and let go alone. Àṣà starts somewhere different. It assumes that the unit of analysis is the team, that performance is co-produced, that to praise a single person without naming the people around them is a kind of category error. The implications are uncomfortable for managers trained in the Western model. Long-running traditions are audited every few years for whether they still serve their purpose.
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
There is no certificate at the end of Àṣà. There is only the slow accumulation of choices made differently — meetings shaped differently, relationships tended differently, decisions weighed differently. The reward is not visible. The cost is real. Over time the difference becomes a kind of life.