Of all the Akan / Ghanaian concepts that have crossed into English usage, Sankofa has had perhaps the strangest journey. Sankofa and the Failed Project? 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
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. 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 Sankofa shapes a thousand small daily choices in a Akan / Ghanaian household, and how those choices accumulate into a different shape of life.
If you don't know where you're going, return to where you came from.Akan
The Question This Post Is About
A post-mortem in the spirit of Sankofa. What it surfaces that other post-mortems miss. 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.
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 Sankofa reading offers a different question: what did we, as a team, fail to make possible for the person carrying this work? Before changing a long-running practice, the team asks an elder of the practice what it was for. The case is not unusual. The reading of it, in the spirit of Sankofa, 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 Sankofa would have us do here, with these particular people, in this particular knot. Before changing a long-running practice, the team asks an elder of the practice what it was for. The discipline of asking the Sankofa 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 Sankofa. The Akan / Ghanaian 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 Sankofa keeps those critics at the table.
What to Do With This
What can you do with this? Begin small. Choose one place — one meeting, one relationship, one daily ritual — and run it through Sankofa for a month. Not as a project. As a quiet experiment. Notice what changes. Sankofa is not learned by reading; it is learned by repetition.
The full philosophy, as a book
How to use your history, your failures, and your traditions as fuel rather than baggage.
Read on Amazon