Looking Back Is Not Going Back
What does Sankofa mean?
Sankofa is an Akan idea about returning for knowledge, values or lessons that have been left behind so they can inform what comes next.
It is often translated into a short phrase such as “go back and get it” or “return and retrieve it.” Museum collections connect the idea to Akan proverbs about the wisdom of looking back in order to know how to move forward.
That last part matters. Sankofa does not ask us to turn around and stay there. It asks what the past still knows that the present may have forgotten.
The bird is looking backward. The body is still moving forward.
One of the best-known Sankofa images is a bird whose head turns back toward its body.
Historical examples survive in Akan gold weights. The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds an eighteenth- to nineteenth-century brass weight from Ghana in the form of the Sankofa bird. The Smithsonian National Museum of African Art also holds bird-form weights associated with proverbs about looking back in order to move forward.
The image works because it holds two directions at the same time.
The head returns.
The body continues.
That is different from nostalgia. Nostalgia can make the past feel safer, cleaner or more complete than it really was. Sankofa does not require that. You can retrieve something valuable without pretending everything surrounding it was good.
Why are there two Sankofa symbols?
Sankofa does not appear in only one fixed visual form.
The backward-looking bird is the version many people recognize immediately, but Akan Adinkra traditions also use a heart-shaped Sankofa form. The Smithsonian National Museum of African Art identifies a heart-shaped Adinkra stamp as Sankofa and describes it as another form of the backward-looking bird, connected to proverbs about learning from the past. The British Museum also holds a heart-shaped Sankofa stamp from Ghana.
That means the two forms are better understood as different visual expressions of the same core idea, not as two unrelated symbols that happen to share a name.
The bird tells the idea almost like a small story: the head returns while the body continues. The heart-shaped form compresses that lesson into a more emblematic sign.
Even the bird itself can appear in different stylizations across objects and contexts. A living visual tradition does not have to behave like a modern corporate logo with one rigid master file.
The important question is not which version is the “real” Sankofa.
It is what both forms are asking us to do with memory.
Sankofa has a material history
Symbols can become so familiar that they start to look as though they have always floated freely in the world.
Sankofa did not. It belongs to Akan systems of language, proverb and visual expression. Akan artists translated ideas into objects that could be seen, handled and interpreted. Proverbs appear in the imagery of gold weights, and Sankofa also appears in Adinkra stamping traditions.
The British Museum, for example, holds a heart-shaped Adinkra stamp identified as Sankofa and connects the design to going back for useful lessons from the past.
That material history is important because it puts the symbol back inside a culture. It was not created as a generic logo for “Africa.” It carries a specific intellectual tradition.
A symbol is not a shortcut around learning
This is one of the reasons we take Adinkra seriously at Asili Roots.
A symbol can be beautiful before you know what it means. But meaning changes how you wear it. Once you know Sankofa is not simply “remember your roots,” the image becomes more demanding. It asks what remembering is for.
- Are you returning to a language because you want to use it?
- A family recipe because you finally understand what it carried?
- A historical figure because the version you learned left someone out?
- A craft, value or way of organizing community because it still solves a problem?
The point is not the backward glance by itself.
The point is what comes back with you.
What Sankofa does not mean
Sankofa is sometimes flattened into a command to preserve everything old because it is old. That misses the intelligence inside the idea.
The past contains wisdom, but it also contains hierarchy, silence, prejudice, mistakes and things every generation has the right to challenge. Retrieval requires judgment.
Some things deserve to be carried forward.
Some deserve to be understood and then left behind.
That is why Sankofa can be more useful than simple nostalgia. It makes memory active rather than decorative.
Why the idea travels so well
Even when the exact family histories are different, many people in the African diaspora recognize the problem Sankofa addresses.
Distance changes inheritance. Migration changes it. Colonialism changes it. Language loss changes it. Assimilation changes it. Sometimes families make deliberate choices about what to keep. Sometimes something disappears because survival required attention elsewhere. Sometimes a younger generation only realizes the value of something after it has become difficult to recover.
Sankofa gives that experience a useful shape.
Return.
Retrieve.
Continue.
Wearing Sankofa with meaning
A cultural symbol does not have to become a lecture every time it appears on a shirt. But knowing what you are carrying matters.
For us, that means Sankofa designs belong inside a larger Adinkra & Symbols context rather than being treated as free-floating “African graphics.” The Collection Library can then connect the symbol to related ideas, designs and future stories without forcing everything into the main navigation.
Memory doing useful work
The strongest part of Sankofa may be how little drama it needs.
No perfect return.
No fantasy that history can be undone.
No demand that we become exactly what our ancestors were.
Just the recognition that progress is not always a straight line — and that moving forward sometimes requires recovering something we passed along the way.
That is not regression.
It is memory doing useful work.
Research sources: Smithsonian National Museum of African Art (Sankofa bird weights and heart-shaped Sankofa Adinkra stamp); The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Akan Sankofa bird gold weight); The British Museum (heart-shaped Sankofa Adinkra stamp).