If you have heard Sankofa only in the context of corporate diversity training or a viral leadership quote, you have not really heard Sankofa. Sankofa in a Founder's First Year? The version of the word that survives in Ghana, West Africa is older, stranger, and more demanding than the version that travels.
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.
The past is not behind us — it is beneath us.Akan saying
The Question This Post Is About
A composite story of an early-stage founder learning Sankofa the hard way. 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? Quarterly retrospectives are not separate from planning — they are the first half of it. 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. Quarterly retrospectives are not separate from planning — they are the first half of it. 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
If you are new to Sankofa, 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 Sankofa actually enters a life.
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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