SANKOFA: Leveraging Indigenous Knowledge Systems for the Future of the Academy
The return of technology to the service of humanity in an era of obsession with improving machines to displace human labour calls for an ethical paradigm that prioritises the re-humanisation of development. Such a paradigm is embedded in several indigenous knowledge systems undergirded by the logic of the categorical imperative as a motif of universal applicability. For our purpose, we resort to the historical paradigm that recentres the past as the start point of deciphering the complexities of the present, towards (re)designing the future of development. This derives from the Akan symbolism of change with the Sankofa bird, as an imagery for the Akan principle of development expressed as ‘se wo were fi na wosankofa a yenkyi’ (it is not forbidden to retrieve what has been forgotten) (see Asante and Archibald: 2023, 160). This is inevitably suited as a panacea to the memory loss challenging development initiatives of the present, especially as expressed in the installation of an antimoral digital public endangered by the habit of uncritical endorsements.
The Sankofa analytic framework comprises a development motif, either when considered as the adornment of the heart or the hind-foresight of the bird (see Asante and Archibald: 2023, 160). In the former, the heart serves as an active agent of memory given its primary role in the trigger of emotions that in turn determine how we remember (see Chen et al, 2025). The adornment of the heart thus implies a beautification of memory through development, not forgetting the agency of the present as the physical embodiment of what is felt and remembered. The more commonly used imagery of Sankofa is that of the bird, within the temporal context of a forward movement, and the head tilted backwards towards its tail while hanging on to an egg with its beak. This also represents the etymology of the word Sankofa when broken in a trisyllabic form as SAN (return), KO (go) and FA (look, search, take), and often expressed as ‘go back and fetch it’ (Ashby, 2011: 12).
The temporal significance of the bird, contextualised in this study within the African cosmogony as the present in constant conversation with the valued past in designing a sustainable future, resonates with West-Pavlov’s (2013) postulation on adopting multiple temporalities to decolonise the Enlightenment abstraction of time as linear and absolute. The latter was canonised through a spatio-temporal aggregation that has enabled imperialist disenfranchisement of the other, as exemplified in the displacement of people from their territories and plunder of resources from their biotopes. As he noted, ‘temporalities are specific to the processes whose energy they are identical with, and to particular sites they inhabit,’ thereby accentuating the need to restore the agency of space in the conceptualisation of time (West-Pavlov, 2013: 175-176). It is the same reversal that is needed for the (il)logic of subjecting immigrants, either directly or by inheritance, to double displacements through a propaganda on criminality so as to be constricted to the same valuation as the homines sacres of today. As such, temporal decoloniality cannot be more relevant than in our era in which the abstraction of time has resulted in rewriting history to fabricate political and socioeconomic problematics under the pretext of an evolving new order.
More specifically, the far-right nationalist agenda in the imperialist world of today have been championed by the proposition that immigration is responsible for the dwindling fortunes of neo-colonisers, in the bid to implicate the other as illegal aliens within their territories. However, alternative spatio-temporal frameworks prove otherwise; that not only are the perpetrators of this biopolitical shame descendants of invaders who drove indigenous peoples from their lands, while indulging in the evils of enduring systematised plunder and genocide from which they are still beneficiaries, but they also subjected fellow humans to the worst treatments from the Middle Passage through to the period of colonial occupation (see Givens, 2022). A 2024 report commissioned by the British Home Office on historicising the Windrush Scandal noted that legislations on citizenship and immigration during the postwar period, specifically from 1948, have been discriminatory against Black people who have been treated differently by the Home Office and others. This, among other deprivations, led to denials of their British nationality, identity and welfare packages, including the rights to live and work in the country. The disenfranchisement was systemically concocted, as exemplified by the registration requirement of the British Nationality Act 1981, following a temporality of exclusion that subsists till date in various policies of the Home Office; which is itself immune to certain obligations regarding the protection of citizens through safeguards provided for by law (see Amnesty International, 2024).
Amidst the global reset that some have proposed as the emergence of a multipolar order, the academy of the present is tasked with creating and institutionalising alternative temporalities rooted in specific geographies and identities. On our continent, this requires multiple but coordinated interventions to enable sustainable growth for realising the Africa that we desire. It is thus imperative that there is synergy between the academy and policy sector through the processes of devising and implementing policies to counter the continuous victimisation and displacement of people of African descent. For instance, the recent declaration of the decade (2026-2036) of reparations by the African Union, after the conclusion of the year of ‘Justice for Africans and People of African Descent through Reparations,’ can only achieve the desired impacts within an African temporality. This temporality would neither exaggerate the romanticisation of the past nor repress it through underwhelming narratives, but create value of it through a forward-looking spectrum in replicating the Sankofa Model. In line with this, the AU’s classification of slavery, colonialism and deportation (hitherto contested as legal within the European legislative temporality) as Crimes Against Humanity (CAH) and Genocide, recentres an African temporality amidst the global effort for a legislative framework for CAH. Nonetheless, the effectiveness and sustainability of these kinds of efforts can only be guaranteed by embedding outcomes in the academy through curricula and pedagogical revisions. The academy is thus tasked to consolidate these efforts with the reawakening of the present as a continuum of the resistance to oppression and search for justice initiated during the eras of slavery and colonialism. Such cohesion between policy and research is fundamental to attain desired goals from the demands for reparative justice, and struggle for an equitable future for those coming behind.
This resonates with the position of President John Dramani Mahama, who is the AU’s champion for reparations, on the need to initiate engagements with a commission of experts on reparations; as well as the ‘integration of political and civic education into national school curricula.’ The institutionalisation of these efforts within the African academy would also facilitate recentring the primordial public as the fulcrum for public morality and temporal framework for 21st Century development; and thus the basis for refining the antimoral digital public to shed its obsessions with the temporal framework of Western pseudo-morality of wokeness. Slater (2019: 21), in adopting the Sankofa model of memorialisation, aligned with this primordial framework to posit that the egg of the African past is embedded in being human. Concepts such as Ujamaa, Ubuntu and Asuwada, as theorised within the African cosmogony, reflect that being human or personhood cannot be properly understood out of community. As Ashby (2011) notes, the Sankofa principle retains its applicability from the individual layer through the familial and community to national cultural modes. The Western canon of individualisation of personality, as captured by the cartesian model of indubitability expressed as ‘cogito ergo suum,’ is thus deficient in its orientation of framing personhood when subjected to the test of the African indigenous knowledge system based on the principle of ‘I am, because we are.’ This deficiency is validated in the various imperialist evils enabled by isolationist principles that continue to breed homines sacres across continents. It is thus based on the temporality of community that the categorisation of slavery, colonialism and deportation as Crimes Against Humanity and Genocide derives legitimacy, especially when one considers that these crimes largely violated the sacrosanct nature of the commune across different societies on the continent.
Conclusion
Recent efforts are evidence of the fact that the academy has a critical role to play, specifically as communities within the continent look toward leadership for direction. This was reiterated by Tupac in his verse when he maintained that leadership must be driven by efforts and consistency of staying focused on the prize. The academy must thus reposition itself as the epistemological foundation of society by taking leadership of the deliberative political public sphere that has been hijacked by techno-oligarchs who often instrumentalize the uncritical antimoral digital public to amass followership and endorsement for their agenda. To achieve this, it ought to be intentional in the production of public intellectuals who will reclaim public consciousness from the siege of anti-intellectualism posing to create a new global order, albeit driven by egotistic transactionalism.
For the continent, the academy must rise to the demands of the time by developing an algorithmic logic that follows an alternative temporality suited to its purpose. The quest for reparative justice must incorporate digital justice to remain relevant in the event of a new global ordering. This is especially because antithetical narratives, that have been sustained by imperial temporality and logic of distortion, remain dominant to continue the victimisation of the past. With the array of techpreneurs on the continent, the academy is tasked to institutionalise the narrativization, digitisation and dissemination of global history from an African perspective. It must work with policy to devise a continental logic for the processes of production and use of technology, which prioritises the protection and progress of the commune, as against the current trend of individualisation that disenfranchises and endangers underserved communities. A technology for the continent must be structured as an architecture of social ordering that retrieves the leadership of the moral public from the shackles of the uncritical mass of antimoral agents in the digital space.
The recent call for re-institutionalising an imperial temporality of supremacy at the Munich Security Conference of February 2026, to negate the guilt of the atrocities of slavery and colonisation so as to build a ‘new western century’ within the ambiguity that has come to characterise claims to civilisation and liberalism (see Schmitz, 2026), should serve as a wakeup call that the progress of the continent would only come from within, and not dependent on those looking to keep it in perpetual servitude. And as EDI Mean concluded in his verse, “…They do what they do to shackle and hold us, so we got to do what we got to do to keep rolling. One way at a time, keep the faith in your mind.”
References
Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press
Akiwowo, Akinsola. 1980. Ajobi and Ajogbe: Variations on the Theme of Sociation. Inaugural Lecture Series 46. Ife: University of Ife Press.
Amnesty International. 2024. The Wind Rush Scandal: Then and Now. Briefing Nationality Rights. December 12, 2024. https://media.amnesty.org.uk/documents/The20Windrush20scandal20then20and20now_0.pdf
Arendt, Hannah. 1961. Between Past and Future. New York: The Viking Press
Aristotle. Physics. Trans. by Robin Waterfield. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Asante, Douglas and Thomas Archibald. 2023. Beyond Ubuntu: Nnoboa and Sankofa as Decolonizing and Indigenous Evaluation Epistemic Foundations from Ghana. Journal of Multidisciplinary Evaluation, 19 (44): 156 – 165
Ashby, Glenville. 2011. Can the Principle of “Sankofa” Be Applied to Address Caribbean Social Issues?. Doctoral Dissertation submitted to Pole Universitaire Euclide.
Chen, Zhou et al. 2025. Emotional Influences on Remembering and Forgetting Explained by Frontal and Parietal Dynamics. Journal of Neurophysiology, 133 (3): 784-798
Croft, Alex. 2024. Putin Aide ‘Crazy’ about Eternal Life Orders Research on Anti-ageing Treatments. Independent, Wednesday September 4 https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/vladimir-putin-russia-age-science-research-b2606784.html
de Carvalho, Isabella. 2025. Pope at Audience: Reflect on Death, Our Tme on Earth Prepares Us for Eternity. Vatican News, Wednesday December 10 https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2025-12/pope-leo-xiv-general-audience-catechesis-death-life-resurrection.html
Duffy, Clare. 2026. A ‘Bellwether’ Social Media Addiction Trial is Underway. It Could Set Off a Chain Reaction. CNN, Sunday February 22 https://edition.cnn.com/2026/02/22/tech/social-media-addiction-trial-tobacco-moment
Ekeh, Peter. 1975. Colonialism and the Two Publics in Africa: A Theoretical Statement. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 17 (1): 91-112
Foucault, Michel. 2004. Naissance de la biopolitique, Paris: Gallima
Givens, Terri. 2022. The Roots of Racism. Bristol: Bristol University Press
Habermas, Jurgen. 2023. A New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and Deliberative Politics. Cambridge: Polity
Hegel, Georg. 2001. The Philosophy of History. Ontario: Batoche Books
Lockwood, Tasmin. 2026. Mapped: Minimum Age Laws for Social Media Around the World. Visual Capitalist, Monday February 26 https://www.visualcapitalist.com/minimum-age-laws-social-media-world-map/
Marcuse, Herbert. 1941. “Some Social Implications of Modern Technology.” In Technology, War and Fascism, Vol. 1 of Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse. New York: Routledge, 41–65.
Mbembe, Achille. 2019. Necropolitics. North Carolina: Duke University Press
Mishak, Cheryl. 2004. Truth and the End of Inquiry: A Peircean Account of Truth. Oxford: Oxford Univeristy Press (Claredon)
Peirce, Charles. 1877. The Fixation of Belief. Popular Science Monthly, 12: 1-15
Plato. 2000. The Republic. Trans. by Tom Griffith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Prashad, Vijay. 2007. The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World. New York/London: The New Press
Ramkumar, Amrith. 2026. Trump Administration Shuns Anthropic, Embraces OpenAI in Clash Over Guardrails. Wall Street Journal, Friday February 27 https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/trump-will-end-government-use-of-anthropics-ai-models-ff3550d9
Schmitz, Rob. 2026. The US Ready to Make Up, Europe Ready to Break Up in Munich. NPR, Monday February 16, https://www.npr.org/2026/02/16/nx-s1-5716050/us-europe-relations-munich
Slater, Jennifer. 2019. Sankofa—the Need to Turn Back to Move Forward: Addressing Reconstruction Challenges that Face Africa and South Africa Today. Studia Historiae Ecclesiasticae, 45 (1): 1-24 https://doi.org/10.25159/2412-4265/4167
Sneha, Samanta. 2025. ‘No Degree, No Discussion’: China’s New Firewall is Coming for Content Creators; Why It Could Be a Good Thing. Times of India, Wednesday October 29, https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/etimes/trending/no-degree-no-discussion-chinas-new-firewall-is-coming-for-content-creators-why-it-could-be-a-good-thing/articleshow/124902662.cms
Soukup, Charles. 2009. Techno-Scopophilia: The Semiotics of Technological Pleasure in Film. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 26 (1): 19-35
The Historical Roots of the Windrush Scandal. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/66f3e61f080bdf716392e860/Historical_Roots_of_the_Windrush_Scandal_-_Independent_Report.pdf
Tushnet, Mark. 2019. Varieties of Populism. German Law Journal, 20: 382-389
West-Pavlov, Russell. 2013. Temporalities. London: Routledge