Àṣà and the Returning Diaspora? It is the kind of question that admits of two answers — a quick one and a true one. The quick answer is that Àṣà means tradition as living practice. adaptive wisdom rather than rigid rules — the things you do because they still work. The true answer takes longer, because Àṣà is not really a concept; it is a way of seeing.
What Àṣà Actually Means
The most commonly cited definition: 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? That sentence is true, as far as it goes. It is also incomplete. Àṣà is held inside a wider Yoruba grammar — a set of related concepts, social practices, and proverbs — that the standalone definition cannot carry.
The river that forgets its source will dry up.Yoruba
The Question This Post Is About
The person who left, lived elsewhere, and came back — and what Àṣà asks of them now. 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.
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 Àṣà reading offers a different question: what did we, as a team, fail to make possible for the person carrying this work? Cultural practices brought by employees from elsewhere are welcomed into the calendar, not flattened. The case is not unusual. The reading of it, in the spirit of Àṣà, 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 Àṣà would have us do here, with these particular people, in this particular knot. Cultural practices brought by employees from elsewhere are welcomed into the calendar, not flattened. The discipline of asking the Àṣà question — instead of the efficiency question, or the blame question — is what changes a working life over years.
Where the Concept Resists
It would be dishonest to pretend Àṣà is uncomplicated. The concept can be — and has been — used to suppress dissent in the name of harmony, to extract unpaid labour from women in the name of community, and to soften criticism that should have been sharper. Any serious reading of Àṣà has to hold these uses in view. The concept survives the criticism. But it is not innocent.
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 Àṣà for a month. Not as a project. As a quiet experiment. Notice what changes. Àṣà is not learned by reading; it is learned by repetition.