/san.ˈkoʊ.fə/
“san” (return) + “ko” (go) + “fa” (fetch) = “go back and get it”
Definition
Sankofa is the profound wisdom of reaching backward into the past to retrieve what was lost, broken, or abandoned, in order to move forward with wholeness and authenticity. It is not nostalgia or mere historical interest, but rather an intentional retrieval of ancestral knowledge, cultural practices, and truths that empower present and future generations. Sankofa recognizes that a people cut off from their roots cannot grow straight; healing requires remembering.
Etymology
Sankofa originates from the Akan peoples of Ghana, particularly the Asante culture, where it remains embedded in proverbs, ceremonies, and visual symbolism. The word itself is a portmanteau constructed from three Akan morphemes: “san” (to return), “ko” (to go), and “fa” (to fetch or retrieve). The name references a legendary bird, the Sankofa bird, whose distinctive characteristic is that it flies forward while looking backward—an image that perfectly captures the concept’s philosophical essence. The Sankofa adinkra symbol (a visual representation) appears throughout West African and diaspora culture, particularly among African Americans who embraced the concept as a framework for reconnecting with pre-colonial heritage. The word gained prominence in the modern era during the Pan-African movement and the Black Power movement of the 1960s-70s, when it became a rallying cry for cultural recovery and decolonization. In contemporary Akan usage, sankofa remains active and vital, referring both to literal historical study and metaphorical spiritual and emotional retrieval.
The linguistic construction of sankofa is pedagogically elegant—the word itself enacts what it means. You must “go” (ko) “return” (san) and “fetch” (fa); the sequence of morphemes mimics the journey of retrieval. This structure reflects Akan philosophical sophistication, where language frequently encodes wisdom. The Akan peoples developed this vocabulary during periods of tremendous disruption (including the trans-Atlantic slave trade), when the capacity to remember, record, and transmit knowledge became acts of survival and resistance.
Cultural Context
To grasp sankofa deeply, one must understand the Ghanaian and broader West African experience of colonialism, slavery, and the disruption of knowledge transmission. When societies are fractured by violence and displacement, knowledge doesn’t simply disappear—it becomes hidden, fragmented, and difficult to access. Sankofa acknowledges this reality while insisting it is possible and necessary to retrieve it. In Ghana, sankofa remains woven into daily life: in the invocation of ancestors before important decisions, in the preservation of oral histories, in the learning of traditional languages and proverbs, in the practice of masquerades and ceremonies that transmit cultural codes through performance. It is a living philosophy, not a historical artifact.
The cultural practice of sankofa involves concrete, sensory activities. A grandmother teaching her granddaughter the complicated patterns of kente cloth weaving is practicing sankofa—each thread color and pattern combination carries encoded historical and familial meaning. The scent of palm oil in soup, the particular way a story is told around an evening fire, the specific hand gestures used in greeting, the rhythms of talking drums—all of these are sankofa moments. The practice often feels like detective work: searching through faded photographs, interviewing elders before their memories fade, learning languages that may have been suppressed, researching genealogies that colonial records tried to erase. There is grief in this work, certainly, but also deep satisfaction and connection. When a person rediscovers a grandmother’s recipe, learns to speak a language their parent couldn’t teach them, or understands for the first time the meaning of a family ritual, they experience the profound rightness of sankofa.
In the diaspora—among African Americans, Afro-Caribbeans, and other descendants of the African diaspora—sankofa took on additional urgency and power. Severed from their ancestral lands and languages by the violence of slavery, millions of descendants discovered that sankofa was the only path toward wholeness and self-determination. The Sankofa movement in the 1960s-70s became inseparable from Black power and Pan-Africanism. Today, sankofa continues to guide Indigenous struggles worldwide; any people seeking to recover languages, land rights, ceremonies, and intellectual traditions that were nearly erased by colonialism and cultural suppression understand sankofa intuitively. It is a word for all people engaged in decolonization—of land, mind, spirit, and culture.
Modern Usage
“Ɛsɛ sɛ yɛsan sankofa—yɛma na ɛsɛ nyinaa wɔ yɛn abusua asem mu.”
“We must embrace sankofa—all our current problems are rooted in our ancestral stories and family history.”