Sankofa is an Akan concept, from the Akan peoples of present-day Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire. It belongs to the adinkra system of symbols, and the word is built from the Twi san (return), ko (go) and fa (fetch) — go back and get it. It is commonly rendered through the proverb “se wo were fi na wosankofa a yenkyi”: there is no shame in going back for what you have forgotten.
The teaching is that retrieving what has been left behind is a condition of moving well into the future, rather than a nostalgic act.
How it reached us, and the problem with that
We encountered Sankofa through Osprey Orielle Lake, writing in The Story Is In Our Bones:
“The symbol of Sankofa is a great mythical bird with her feet firmly planted forward and her head turned backward. And, as I understood from Pandora and further research, Sankofa conveys the wisdom of learning from the past to ensure a strong future.
Sankofa is an acknowledgement that critical examination is vital in gathering the knowledge we need, and that remembering the course of the past provides irreplaceable guidance in charting a wise and strategic path ahead.”
That is a settler author’s gloss, itself credited to a person named only by first name. It is the whole of what we held on this concept, and it is not adequate.