Begin with the word itself. Àṣà, in Yoruba, sits in a different grammatical and emotional register than its closest English equivalents. Àṣà in a Family Argument? You cannot answer that question without first sitting with the word — and noticing what English doesn't quite have a slot for.
What Àṣà Actually Means
Translators usually settle on something like: 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? It is a defensible translation. But translation is the surface. Àṣà carries underneath it a set of assumptions — about what a person is, what owes what to whom, and what success even means — that the English sentence cannot deliver.
The river that forgets its source will dry up.Yoruba
The Question This Post Is About
A family dispute, watched through the lens of Àṣà. 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? Team rituals are not abolished when they become inconvenient — they are revisited and renewed. 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. Team rituals are not abolished when they become inconvenient — they are revisited and renewed. 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
There is no certificate at the end of Àṣà. There is only the slow accumulation of choices made differently — meetings shaped differently, relationships tended differently, decisions weighed differently. The reward is not visible. The cost is real. Over time the difference becomes a kind of life.