Sankofa as Praxis: Ontological Healing, Memory, and Decolonial Return

This paper theorizes Sankofa—the Akan principle of “return and retrieve”—as a decolonial praxis of ontological healing, memory, and African radical insurgence. Writing from a Ghanaian diasporic standpoint shaped by the crossings, frictions, and possibilities of U.S. academic life, I recount racial and ontological harms across my academic trajectory and examine how practices of Sankofa became literacies of healing. These literate acts include (a) traveling back to Ghana as a transnational re-education on Blackness, (b) witnessing African Americans’ somatic and sartorial rituals of healing at historic slave sites, (c) engaging Indigenous knowledge through encounters in a chief’s palace, and (d) enacting everyday literacies of cultural pride—such as wearing Ghanaian clothing—as somatic and symbolic resistance. Drawing on Critical Race Theory, Sankofa, and Global Black Rhetorics, I advance an interpretive heuristic in which Sankofa narrativization functions as a method, and the burdens of my racialized memories become the archive through which I theorize harm and healing. This work contributes to qualitative inquiry and Global Black Rhetorics by positioning African epistemologies not as mere cultural repositories but as methodological heuristics that expand how we understand healing, literacy, and decolonial research practice.