Sankofa: The Power of Turning Back to Remember

There is a moment — so quiet, so seismic — when something inside you rearranges. A moment when a word, a symbol, a whisper from an ancient tongue lands in your spirit and suddenly gives name to what your bones have already known.

For me, that word was Sankofa.

I didn’t grow up hearing this word. I didn’t learn it in all my years of university. Not in classrooms, not in textbooks, not in any of the decades I’ve spent studying philosophy. I’ve read the Greeks. I’ve traced their ideas through the Enlightenment, into postmodernism, and beyond. I’ve examined knowledge systems through Western frameworks, dissected thought, mapped logic, explored theories of being.

But no one ever told me that some of the most profound philosophical systems in human history come from Africa.

No one told me about the Akan people — their cosmology, their ethics, their understanding of personhood, balance, relationship, and sacred responsibility.

No one told me about Adinkra symbols, about Kra and Sunsum, or about how deeply they grasped the interconnectedness of all life.

And no one told me about Sankofa.

What Is Sankofa?

In the Akan tradition of Ghana, Sankofa is represented by a bird reaching its head backward to retrieve an egg from its back. The name comes from the words:

San – to return

Ko – to go

Fa – to fetch, to retrieve

Together, Sankofa means:

“Go back and fetch it.”

It is a call.

A remembering.

A sacred instruction.

Sankofa teaches that it is not only okay to return to the past — it is essential. That we must go back and retrieve what was left behind, what was stolen, what was buried. That healing and wholeness do not come from constantly moving forward, but from retracing our steps, honouring the wisdom of our ancestors, and reclaiming the parts of ourselves that were forgotten, denied, or silenced.

The Moment I Knew

The past four months have been filled with something I could only describe as a spiritual awakening through grief and fire. I didn’t have the language for it at the time — only the sensation. The feeling that something ancient was trying to get my attention. That my writing wasn’t just content — it was remembering.

Each blog I’ve written lately — about the war inside us, about what goes viral and why, about losing the magic in life, the myth of credibility, the longing for connection — has felt like peeling back layers of amnesia.

And then I found Sankofa.

Or rather, Sankofa found me.

And suddenly, it all made sense.

I was living it — and it had a name.

Outrage and Awakening

There’s a particular kind of rage that comes not from hatred, but from clarity. From waking up and realizing that you’ve been starved of your inheritance. That knowledge was kept from you — not by accident, but by design.

To spend your life seeking wisdom, only to learn that the root of the wisdom traditions you studied — the origin of many Greek philosophical concepts — came from Africa, and yet Africa was erased from the story?

That’s not just a historical injustice — it’s a theft of identity.

It’s a colonization of memory.

And it makes me want to weep and scream at the same time.

Because it’s not just about me. It’s about all of us.

What else have we forgotten? What else are we living without names for, because the stories of our ancestors were cut from the curriculum, cut from the canon, cut from the conversation?

Sankofa as a Way of Life

Sankofa is not just a concept. It is a soul directive. It’s what I’ve been doing without knowing — turning back to re-member what colonialism tried to dis-member.

In Akan philosophy, personhood is not just given — it is cultivated. You become a full person not through status, but through your ability to live in harmony with the world, with your ancestors, with yourself.

This is not individualism. It is interbeing. It is the village within I’ve been writing about.

The belief that wholeness comes from relationship — not possession. That knowledge lives in symbols, stories, songlines, and soul.

And this… this is the very heart of what I’ve been trying to say all along.

This Is the Work

The work of remembering. The work of turning back.

Not to dwell in the past — but to reclaim what is ours.

And not just for those of African descent.

This is an invitation to all of us — to recognize that the foundations of global wisdom are not Western. They are Earth-rooted. They are Indigenous. They are ancestral. And they belong to all peoples who carry the courage to look back and listen.

So here I am.

A student again. A child of the mystery, bowing in reverence to what I was never taught — but always somehow knew.

Sankofa is not just about the past.

It’s about finally coming home.