Begin with the word itself. Sankofa, in Akan / Twi, sits in a different grammatical and emotional register than its closest English equivalents. Sankofa and the Job You Don't Want to Take? You cannot answer that question without first sitting with the word — and noticing what English doesn't quite have a slot for.
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.
Se wo were fi na wosankofa a yenkyi.Akan — It is not wrong to go back for what you forgot.
The Question This Post Is About
Walking through a real career choice using Sankofa as the question. 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 also the question of authority. Who gets to speak for Sankofa? The traditions in which it lives are old, plural, sometimes in disagreement with each other. Anyone — including the writer of this essay — who claims a definitive reading is overreaching. The careful reader treats every restatement of Sankofa, including this one, as one voice among many.
What to Do With This
The reading you have just done is one entry into Sankofa. There are many others. Akan elders, Ghana, West Africa writers, and the daily life of communities that have lived this concept for centuries are richer sources than any essay. Treat this as a doorway, not a destination.
The full philosophy, as a book
How to use your history, your failures, and your traditions as fuel rather than baggage.
Read on Amazon