Sankofa Meaning: The Akan Return-and-Get-It Symbol

Sankofa means "go back and get it." It comes from Twi, the Akan language of Ghana, and it is built from three words: san (to return), kɔ (to go), and fa (to take or fetch). It is one of the adinkra symbols.

That is the whole answer. Everything below is the part people usually get wrong: which proverb it belongs to, why there are two completely different pictures using the same name, and what actually happened when the symbol crossed the Atlantic.

What is the sankofa proverb in Twi?

The symbol is tied to an Akan proverb that is usually written like this:

Sɛ wo werɛ fi na wosankɔfa a yɛnkyi.

The Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture renders it as "it is not taboo to go back and fetch what you forgot." Other translations you will see include "it is not wrong to go back for that which you have forgotten."

A note on spelling, because this is where a lot of published material falls apart. Twi uses letters that are not in the English alphabet, including ɛ (an open e) and ɔ (an open o). Most websites drop them, so the same proverb shows up as "Se wo were fi na wosankofa a yenkyi," or split differently as "Se wo were firi na wosan kofa a, yenkyiri." These are transliterations of the same sentence, not different sayings. If a seller quotes you a version with the special characters intact, that is a small sign somebody checked their work. If they quote a version that has been machine-translated into something poetic and unrecognizable, that is a sign of the opposite.

The grammar matters too. Sankofa is an imperative. It is an instruction, not a noun and not a mood. "Go back and get it." The English shorthand you see on coffee mugs, something like "reach back," softens a command into a vibe. The original is blunter than that.

What are the two sankofa symbols?

There are two accepted visual forms, and they are not variations on one drawing. They look nothing alike.

The bird. A stylized bird with its feet planted forward and its head turned all the way around to its back, usually carrying an egg in its beak. The body is going one direction. The attention is going the other. The egg is the thing being retrieved, and it is the part people forget to include. A bird looking backward with an empty beak is just a bird looking backward.

The heart. A curling, symmetrical shape with two spirals that meet at the top and come to a point at the bottom. It reads as a heart to Western eyes, though that is not what it is drawing. This is the form the National Park Service carved into the memorial at the African Burial Ground in Lower Manhattan.

Both are correct. Both are called sankofa. The heart form is more common in architecture and jewelry because it is symmetrical and scales down cleanly. The bird is more common in illustration and painting because the narrative is legible at a glance.

One caution worth stating plainly. The heart-shaped sankofa is easy to confuse with akoma, a different adinkra symbol that actually is a heart and means patience and endurance. The Smithsonian describes a dashiki in its collection that carries a sankofa on the front and an akoma on the back, two separate symbols with two separate meanings on one garment. Vendors mix them up constantly.

Where do adinkra symbols come from?

Adinkra are stamped symbols from the Akan peoples of Ghana and neighboring Côte d'Ivoire. Traditionally the cloth was printed by hand, using carved calabash stamps dipped in a dark plant-based dye, pressed into a grid drawn on cotton. Asante royalty wore the large white and maroon wrappers during mourning. The Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art puts the count at more than 150 identified symbols, with recent additions pushing the total higher.

The origin story you will read most often says the symbols came from Gyaman, and that the Asante learned adinkra printing after defeating the Gyaman king Nana Kwadwo Adinkra. It is a good story. It also runs into a date problem. The oldest surviving adinkra cloth in a museum is the one the British Museum holds, accession number Af1818,1114.23, collected in Kumasi by Thomas Edward Bowdich in 1817. The Asante-Gyaman war did not begin until 1818. Adinkra cloth was already being produced in the Asante capital before the war the legend credits.

So the honest version is that the symbol system is old, Akan, and its exact route into Asante hands is still argued over by historians. That is a more interesting fact than the tidy legend, and it is the kind of thing worth knowing before you buy anything with the word "ancient" in the product description. We wrote a fuller breakdown of the symbol system in our guide to adinkra symbols and Akan visual language if you want the wider set.

Why does sankofa matter so much in the diaspora?

Because the instruction fits the situation exactly.

For people whose ancestors were taken through the Atlantic slave trade, the past is not simply available. Names were changed, languages were cut off, family lines were broken on purpose and the records were kept by the people doing the breaking. Sankofa does not say the past is safe or intact. It says going back for it is permitted. It says retrieval is not shameful, not backward, not a failure to move on.

That reframing is the whole appeal. A lot of American culture treats looking back as weakness. Sankofa treats it as method.

The clearest institutional expression of this is the African Burial Ground National Monument in Lower Manhattan. In 1991, construction crews working on a federal building uncovered a colonial-era cemetery for free and enslaved Africans. The remains of 419 people were eventually reinterred at the site, and the memorial, completed in 2007 by architect Rodney Leon, carries the sankofa symbol as its central design element. The National Park Service describes sankofa there as looking to the past to inform the future, and applies it directly to how the country handles the history of slavery.

There is also a well-known archaeological claim attached to that site: that a pattern of iron tacks on one coffin lid, known as Burial 101, forms a sankofa. It is genuinely contested. Some scholars read it as a sankofa, others argue the design is Anglo-American and that the symbol may not have existed in that form in West Africa at the time. Nobody has settled it. Anyone who tells you flatly that a sankofa was found on a colonial New York coffin is overstating what the evidence supports, and anyone who tells you flatly that it was not is doing the same thing.

How do artists use sankofa today?

As a structure more than a stamp, usually.

The Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture holds Sankofa II, a large acrylic painting by James Phillips, roughly eight feet tall. Phillips builds the work out of layered symbols pulled from several traditions at once, with the heart-shaped sankofa at the center, other Akan adinkra forms around it, and elements drawn from Yoruba and Haitian visual traditions worked into the same field. The museum connects the patterning to the AfriCOBRA tradition. It is not a picture of a symbol. It is a painting organized by the idea the symbol names.

Haile Gerima's 1993 film Sankofa did the same thing in another medium, using the word as a title for a story about a contemporary woman pulled back into the past of a plantation. Again, the symbol is the method, not the decoration.

That distinction is the useful one for anybody buying art. A sankofa printed large on a canvas is a graphic. A painting that is genuinely about return, about inheritance, about carrying something forward that was almost lost, does the work whether or not the symbol appears anywhere in it. We went deeper on that difference in why personal cultural art beats symbol-first decor.

How do you buy sankofa art without getting a fake?

A few checks that take under a minute each.

Check the picture against the definition. Bird with head turned back, feet forward, egg in the beak. Or the symmetrical double-spiral heart. If it is a bird facing forward, or a heart with no spirals, it is not sankofa and the seller did not look it up.

Check the wording. If the listing quotes the proverb, see whether the translation is one of the standard ones or something invented. "It is not taboo to go back and fetch what you forgot" is the museum-standard rendering. Sweeping motivational paraphrases that no institution uses are a signal the copy was generated, not researched.

Check whether the symbol is doing anything. Mass-market print shops paste adinkra onto backgrounds by the hundred. The symbol is there because it sells, not because the piece means anything by it.

Check who made it and who gets paid. This is the part that separates a cultural object from a stock graphic. At Noirci Studio we print African American art on archival canvas in the United States, to order, and the artist takes a royalty on every sale. Nothing in our catalog is AI-generated, and we do not resell overseas mass-produced prints. Founder Robert Lawrence has been painting since 2006, which is the reason the standard exists in the first place. If you want work in this territory, our Afrocentric art collection is the place to start.

For a longer checklist on vetting sellers who use African symbolism, we put one together in our guide to verifying African symbols online.

The short version

Sankofa is a Twi imperative meaning "go back and get it," drawn either as a backward-looking bird with an egg or as a spiraling heart, and carried out of Akan Ghana into diaspora use because the instruction it gives happens to describe what recovering an interrupted history actually requires. It is not a decoration. It is a sentence, and it is telling you to do something.

Get the spelling right, get the picture right, and be suspicious of anyone selling it who did neither.

Sources

• National Park Service, African Burial Ground National Monument, "Sankofa" The agency's own reading of the symbol as looking to the past to inform the future, and its application to how the history of slavery is acknowledged.
• National Park Service, "Adinkra Symbols" at the African Burial Ground Documents the adinkra symbols, sankofa among them, engraved into the memorial's interior.
• National Park Service, "The Ancestral Libation Chamber" design document Signed by Rodney Leon of AARRIS Architects, describing the seven memorial elements and the reinterment of 419 individuals.
• Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Sankofa II by James Phillips Collection object number 2014.321, including the museum's translation of the sankofa proverb, its identification of the heart form at the center of the painting, and the Yoruba and Haitian elements Phillips worked in.
• The British Museum, adinkra cloth, accession number Af1818,1114.23 Collected in Kumasi by Thomas Edward Bowdich in 1817, the oldest surviving adinkra textile in a museum collection.
• Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, adinkra stamp (Akan artist, Ghana) Collection record for a carved gourd stamp of the kind used to print adinkra cloth.