Sankofa

There is a particular kind of grief that comes not from loss, but from distance — the distance between who you are and where you came from. The Akan people of Ghana gave that feeling a name, and a symbol. Its lesson is not about grief at all. It is about wisdom.

At a glance

What Sankofa Means

Sankofa is a word in Twi, the language of the Akan people of Ghana. It is formed from three smaller words: san (return), ko (go), fa (take or fetch). Taken together, they describe a single action: go back and get it.

The symbol’s associated proverb makes this explicit: Se wo were fin a wo sankofa a yenkyi — “It is not wrong to go back for what you forgot.” This is not a proverb about regret. It is a proverb about wisdom — about the courage to reach backward in order to move forward well.

Sankofa appears in two distinct visual forms. The first is a stylised bird with its body facing forward but its head turned fully backward, holding an egg in its beak. The bird moves forward; it does not stop. But it looks back, and in looking back, it carries something forward. The egg is the future. The turned head is the knowledge that protects it. The second form is more abstract: a symmetrical heart shape. Both encode the same philosophy. The direction of travel is always forward. What changes is what you carry with you.

“It is not wrong to go back for what you forgot.”

The Story Behind the Symbol

To understand why Sankofa was created, you have to understand how the Akan people understood time. In Akan cosmology, time is not a straight line that disappears behind you as you walk. It is layered — the past does not recede, it deepens. The ancestors are not absent; they are present in a different register. What happened before is not gone; it is the ground beneath the present moment.

Adinkra symbols were originally stamped onto cloth using carved calabash gourds and a dye made from the bark of the Badie tree. This cloth was worn at funerals and important ceremonies — occasions when the relationship between the living and those who had gone before was most acutely felt. Sankofa was used in these contexts because it spoke to the question that every funeral raises: what do we carry forward from the people we have lost?

Over time, the symbols migrated beyond cloth to architecture, gold weights, pottery, and the walls of traditional Akan buildings. Sankofa appears on the façade of the Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park in Accra, and carved into the stone of the African Burial Ground National Memorial in Manhattan — a site marking the resting place of thousands whose stories had been buried beneath the city for centuries. In that context, the symbol’s meaning is almost unbearably precise: this place asks us to go back and get what was forgotten.

Cultural Significance

Sankofa has become the most widely recognised Adinkra symbol in the world, and its journey to that position is itself a story about exactly what the symbol teaches.

When scholars, artists, and activists in the African diaspora began the project of cultural reclamation in the mid-20th century, Sankofa became a touchstone. You cannot know where you are going without knowing where you came from. The symbol had a name for this principle long before the diaspora needed it. Manthia Diawara’s 1993 film Sankofa brought the symbol to a wide audience, making the argument that confronting the past — rather than running from it — is the only path to genuine freedom.

Today Sankofa appears in university crests, community murals, and the work of diaspora artists across five continents. It is among the most popular Adinkra motifs for tattoos — partly for its aesthetic elegance, and partly because its meaning translates across every culture and context. The need to look back honestly at where you came from, and carry forward what you find there, is not an African concern. It is a human one. The Akan people simply had the wisdom to put a name and a shape to it.

Why It Still Matters

We live in a culture that treats the past as something to be escaped — a weight to put down, not a resource to draw from. Sankofa offers a different architecture entirely. It does not ask you to live in the past. It asks you to know it.

The bird turns its head to look back. The egg is secure in its beak. The body moves forward. That is the posture Sankofa asks of us: to move through the present with genuine knowledge of where we come from, and to carry that knowledge not as a burden but as a foundation. For anyone reconnecting with African heritage — or with any heritage that has been disrupted, suppressed, or simply lost — this symbol offers something rarer than consolation. It offers direction.

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