Sankofa

Meaning

A Twi proverb meaning "Go back and get it," often extended as "It is not taboo to go back for what you forgot or left behind." It expresses that recovering valuable knowledge, values, or history from the past is not a step backward, and that moving forward well depends on doing so.

Cultural note

This is the heart-and-spiral rendering of Sankofa, one of two forms the symbol takes — the other is a bird with its head turned backward, described in the sankofa-bird entry. This version removes the bird and adds mirror symmetry, leaving a pair of spirals inside a heart-like outline. Ethno-mathematician Ron Eglash, in his Culturally Situated Design Tools research (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute), traces the spiral in the original bird form to a logarithmic curve, the same curve European mathematics would not formally describe until roughly two centuries after Descartes. Because this heart-and-spiral version omits the bird, some sources treat it as a later, more abstract rendering rather than the original Adinkra cloth stamp; the sources consulted do not settle that distinction.

ORIGIN

Akan people — Ghana

LANGUAGE

Twi

SOURCES

Nana Kwabena, Adinkra Symbols, Sankofa Symbol — Meaning, History & Images, 2020 · Ron Eglash, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Adinkra Spirals — Culturally Situated Design Tools

VERIFIED

2026-08-14