Of all the Akan / Ghanaian concepts that have crossed into English usage, Sankofa has had perhaps the strangest journey. Sankofa and Performance Reviews? The journey itself is part of the answer. To understand Sankofa now, you have to understand both the original and the diasporic version, and the gap between them.
What Sankofa Actually Means
The most commonly cited definition: Sankofa is an Akan word and a symbol — most often a bird with its head turned backward, holding an egg in its beak. The egg is the future; the head turned backward is the past. Together they teach a simple, demanding idea: it is not wrong, nor shameful, to go back and fetch what you forgot. The future cannot be built on amnesia. That sentence is true, as far as it goes. It is also incomplete. Sankofa is held inside a wider Akan grammar — a set of related concepts, social practices, and proverbs — that the standalone definition cannot carry.
Se wo were fi na wosankofa a yenkyi.Akan — It is not wrong to go back for what you forgot.
The Question This Post Is About
What Sankofa would change about how performance is measured and discussed. The question is worth taking seriously, because Sankofa 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 Sankofa 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. Sankofa 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. Quarterly retrospectives are not separate from planning — they are the first half of it.
A Second Angle
For the person living far from Ghana, 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 — Sankofa can feel like it belongs to someone else's life. It does not. The diasporic reading of Sankofa is not a watered-down version. It is a different test of the same idea. Quarterly retrospectives are not separate from planning — they are the first half of it.
Where the Concept Resists
There is also the question of authority. Who gets to speak for Sankofa? The traditions in which it lives are old, plural, sometimes in disagreement with each other. Anyone — including the writer of this essay — who claims a definitive reading is overreaching. The careful reader treats every restatement of Sankofa, including this one, as one voice among many.
What to Do With This
The reading you have just done is one entry into Sankofa. There are many others. Akan elders, Ghana, West Africa writers, and the daily life of communities that have lived this concept for centuries are richer sources than any essay. Treat this as a doorway, not a destination.
The full philosophy, as a book
How to use your history, your failures, and your traditions as fuel rather than baggage.
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