Sankofa, a User's Guide: Three Moves to Decide With Your Past

We wear Sankofa around our necks, on t-shirts, across the backs of jackets. The bird with its head turned back has become a logo. But Sankofa is not an image. It is a move. And a move can be learned.

It Is Not Taboo

The Akan proverb says: Se wo were fi a, wo san ko fa a yenkyi. "If you forgot something and you go back to fetch it, it is not taboo." Read it again. The proverb commands nothing. It gives permission. Far from the "never forget your roots" cliché stuck to it, it does not even mention roots. It speaks of a round trip. Look at the bird: its feet move forward, only its head turns back. Sankofa never turns around.

The real question remains: go back and fetch what? Building this brand, we came to understand the answer holds in three moves.

Teachings, Not Just Stories

"Tell me about the old country." We have all said it. And we have all received the same thing: the version told a hundred times, polished by the years, the postcard. That is what a vague question triggers: a story. A story is for listening. It cannot be reused.

Ask a question that starts from what you are living instead. Thinking about changing careers? "Why did you choose yours? What would you do differently? Tell me about the day you knew you had to leave." Those questions have no ready-made answer. They force a return to the moment when nothing was decided yet. And they tell your elder: I take you seriously, as a witness.

What comes back is no longer a story. It is a teaching. And it will serve you, because you went looking for it.

Know-How, Not Just Words

Not everything gets said. The American novelist Alice Walker was searching for the origin of her writing. She found the answer in her mother's garden: more than fifty varieties of flowers, replanted every year, after full days of work. Her conclusion: "We have constantly looked high, when we should have looked high, and low."

Inherited knowledge is almost never labeled as knowledge. It is stored in a recipe, a way of hosting, a way of handling money. Take the tontine: several people contribute, and each takes a turn. Africans in Newport were running one as early as 1780. The first American credit union would not open until 1908, one hundred and twenty-eight years later.

Criteria, Not Just Rules

Last move, the most important one. Whatever you bring back, do not copy it as is. A rule tells you what to do, and some deserve keeping. But a rule ages with its era. A criterion tells you how to judge, and it travels. Walker came out of her mother's garden with two: a love of beauty, a respect for strength. She does not garden. She writes. Her whole body of work stands on those two criteria.

That is the difference between imitating your past and deciding with it.

The Sankofa Collection

On August 25, our Sankofa collection drops. We built it as a reminder, not a shortcut. Wearing Sankofa commits you to nothing. Doing Sankofa commits you to everything. It is our motto in a single symbol: we honor the past and embrace the future, because without the first, the second has nothing to stand on.

Note: Sankofa is an adinkra, one of the graphic symbols of the Akan peoples of Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire. Each adinkra condenses a maxim, printed on cloth since at least the early nineteenth century.