Sankofa

Return, so you can move forward well

Sankofa is an Akan concept from Ghana — return for what was left behind in order to move forward. Here is what it means for leadership and organizational culture.

Sankofa is an Akan concept from Ghana that means, in plain terms, to go back and get it. It teaches that moving forward well often requires returning for something valuable that was left behind — a truth, a practice, a way of being that a people carried before it was lost or set down. In the Adinkra symbol tradition, Sankofa is pictured as a bird whose body faces forward while its head turns back to lift an egg from its own back: forward motion and deliberate return, held in a single image.

The proverb behind it is often rendered as there is no shame in returning for what you have forgotten. That is the whole orientation of CultureROOTS in one line. The work looks back toward older wisdom about what sustains people, and carries it forward into a culture that can renew itself.

What Sankofa means

Sankofa belongs to the Adinkra tradition of the Akan people, a system of symbols that each hold a proverb or principle. It is a movement rather than a monument — its meaning lives in the act of returning and bringing something back, more than in any reverence for the past on its own.

That distinction matters, because return is easily mistaken for nostalgia. Nostalgia wants the past back for comfort. Sankofa reaches back for what is still useful and carries it into the present to do real work. The direction of travel is forward. The return is how you gather what you need for the road. What is reclaimed becomes material for what comes next.

Marcus Garvey made this a diasporic principle long before the word became widely known. In Message to the People, his course on African philosophy, he argued that a people cut off from knowledge of themselves cannot stand fully upright, and that reclaiming that knowledge is the ground of dignity and of the capacity to build. The decolonial and liberation-psychology traditions carry the same insight into healing: as scholars such as Santana describe, returning to what was suppressed is often how love, wisdom, and repair become possible again. Return, in this lineage, is a forward act.

The four movements

Sankofa gives CultureROOTS its arc. The work moves through four movements, and they are the shape of the whole journey rather than four separate steps.

Remember. Return to what actually sustains people — the values, relationships, and conditions that supported thriving before they were optimized away or never made room for.

Relate. Restore right relationship. Reconnect people to one another and to a shared sense of what the work is for, in the relational register Ubuntu names — because remembering alone changes little until it lives between people.

Restore. Repair what has been strained. Bring the lived reality of a workplace back toward the values it professes, and tend the conditions that have been depleted, so that what people experience and what they are told come closer together.

Regenerate. Build forward so the culture renews itself rather than depletes the people inside it. This is where Sankofa hands off to the organizational work of regenerative culture — a culture designed to give back more than it takes.

Read together, the four movements turn a diagnosis into a direction. They are why CultureROOTS does not stop at describing a culture. The point of seeing clearly is to know what to return to, what to repair, and what to build.

Sankofa in leadership

For a leader, Sankofa is a discipline of judgment. A great deal of organizational life runs on the assumption that newer is better and forward means leaving things behind. Sankofa asks a different question at the moment of change: what did the old way protect that the new way is about to lose, and how do we carry that forward on purpose?

Leaders who work this way treat their people's history as information. When morale drops after a reorganization, they ask what the previous structure was quietly holding together. When a practice is retired for efficiency, they ask what it was doing for trust or belonging that now has nowhere to live. Change still happens; it happens in a way that keeps what sustains people intact through the transition.

How Sankofa lives in CultureROOTS

Sankofa is one of three traditions that ground the work, and each does a distinct job. Ubuntu holds the relational foundation. Ma'at supplies the framework of principles a culture is read against. Sankofa carries the movement — the orientation that turns the reading toward renewal and gives the whole diagnostic its direction.

You will feel Sankofa most in what happens after the reading. A CultureROOTS diagnostic does not end at a picture of where a culture stands; it opens toward what to remember, restore, and regenerate. That is the movement in motion. A workplace, like a people, can go back for what it left behind and be stronger for having carried it forward.

Remember what sustains us. By remembering what sustains us, we become better stewards of ourselves, each other, and the systems we shape. And by remembering what sustains us, we move from saying the right things to sustaining the conditions that make them real.