Go Back and Fetch It: Sankofa and the Cult of Progress — Local Futures
Last year, I was one of an international throng of localists (yes, international localists) to descend on Bristol, UK. We were there for the Planet Local Summit — perhaps the largest gathering of this movement to date. It was as if everyone I’d ever read or listened to on a podcast or seen in a documentary film was there in the flesh — like a vivid dream that leaves you astounded and exhausted upon waking.
Rutendo Ngara, however, was a new face to me. Only later did I learn that she is not only a holder of indigenous African knowledge systems, an academic, and a board member of groups that protect sacred sites, but she is also an international silver medalist for South Africa in martial arts — a master of Kung Fu and Tai Chi. Oh, and she is a trained engineer in electrics and biomedicine. Just casually.
It was my not-so-humble job to interview her (you can watch snippets from the interview here, or you can hear it as a podcast here).
I remember fetching Rutendo from the stage after she gave her address. I was exhausted from the Summit, ready to go home, my candle burnt at both ends. But as I walked with Rutendo up the quiet stairwell, I felt humbled.
She was small, maybe only coming up to my shoulder, with a kind, gentle energy. She was adorned with bold colours and patterns, and jewellery that jangled as we walked. Woven into her locks were shells, beads and various carved symbols which I could not decipher. She radiated a metaphysical power, and I felt strangely naked in my conference attire: collared shirt, lanyard, straight-legged pants. I was struck with the thought that I would have felt more at home next to her if I were dressed in my queer club-kid get up: eyeliner and a leather skirt. Alas, maybe next time, Rutendo.
In the interview, Rutendo shared some powerful concepts. I want to pick up on one of those concepts, and weave it back into my thinking. I want to pick it like a ripened seed and sow it anew, that its output may grow; that it may take deeper root in my own worldview.
The principle is Sankofa, and it comes from the Akan people of Ghana. It’s represented by a symbol — a bird, its feet facing forward, looking back at itself, and holding in its beak what is sometimes an egg, sometimes a seed.
Rutendo articulated its meaning: “It’s not wrong to go back from where we came from. They tell you, go back and fetch it. It is only through going back to fetch it that we’re able to inform the present in order to create the future.”
It is a beautiful symbol. The arched curvature of the bird’s neck is giving Japanese Crane or Brolga in courtship. The seed/egg is a mystery treasure — as if anything might spring from it at any moment.
Somehow, the symbol swiftly resolves the whole chicken-or-the-egg conundrum, elegantly depicting a much more sophisticated conception of cause-and-effect.
Time, Rutendo explains, cycles back on itself. The future is a conversation with the past. The universe is fractal rather than mechanistic — patterned, but innately alive… creative and not entirely predictable.
Big concepts, and Rutendo moves quickly. Hard to grasp as words, I sink back into a more intuitive clarity. All this feels true to me, even in my collared shirt and lanyard. I love the symbol, and I love the word. Sankofa. Go back and fetch it. How exquisite.
At a time when the world feels kind of stuck, colonial power dynamics stabilised in the concrete of modernity, the possibilities of the future reduced to a certain dystopia, the Sankofa code suggests a way of breaking the stalemate: look back.
Sankofa connects with the concept of Ancient Futures — a guiding tenet of the localisation movement, and the title of the book that set me on my path here, to the Planet Local Summit. In Ancient Futures, Helena Norberg-Hodge teases out vital lessons from the traditional culture of Ladakh, for the sake of a rapidly globalising world.
If it is possible to summarise the most fundamental and urgent of these lessons, it is this: Human beings grow strong, healthy, joyful and wise by being deeply embedded in a web of place-based, interdependent relationships. Our hearts, hands and minds develop in and through a living community, in and through the plants, animals, soils and waters on which we ultimately depend for our survival.
In other words, we experience our full potential not by ‘mastering’ and going beyond the confines of nature, but by belonging to it; by being woven into her complex and ever-changing fabric.
Both Ancient Futures and Sankofa posit: In order to have true progress, we need to go back. This notion forms an underlying philosophical cornerstone on which my worldview is based. True progress is a returning.
This goes against the ideological foundation of the global consumer culture, where progress means a linear onwards march, always to bigger and “better” things. It is that dream which continues to possess tech billionaires in their sleep.
Meanwhile, Sankofa resonates in other corners of the world. Despite the influence of modern education, I have seen it arise through the subterranean channels of intuitive wisdom among young urbanites from Sydney to New Delhi, igniting an innate hunger to relearn timeless embodied skills, like sewing, baking, weaving, dyeing, carving, butchery, tending plants.
In Indigenous Australia, a Sankofa/Ancient Futures perspective finds expression in the worldview of the Dreaming, and it is even embedded in language itself.
Yolngu woman Sienna Stubbs says:
“When Yolngu sing, we sing in a tense that doesn’t exist in English. The songmen are recalling … what is happening now. This has always happened, is happening, and will happen in the future. Yolngu people have always sat/are sitting/will always sit under the shaded resting place named Bunjumbirr at this place and were thinking/think/will think about the fish that they will catch later in the day. The past is in the present is in the future. Our ancestors were here, are here and will be here, waiting for the tide to go out so the fish can be caught. Yambirrpa has always provided fish for Yolngu people and it will continue to. This structure has helped sustain both Yolngu life and the balance of the natural world for thousands of years. This is how Yolngu live. It is in the songs.”
While the Yolngu’s reverence of the past helps maintain the structure of social and ecological balance into the future, so much of the great destruction wrought by modernity is founded on its trashing of the past. It condemns pre-industrial, pre-colonial society as backwards, primitive and poor — something to run away from, rather than to return to and learn from. So often, modernity (as manifest in schooling, media and development policy) demands that we abandon the past, uprooting ourselves from it, instead of stemming from it like the Sankofa seed.
In its own quasi-religious way, the modern cult of progress promises deliverance from the horrors of the past through the saviour, technology. In this vision, technological prowess will tame and control nature, manage society, take humanity to other planets, and even conquer physical death. One need only listen to speeches by the likes of Ray Kurzweil or Elon Musk to hear this ideology speak. It is less explicit — and therefore perhaps even more dangerous — in the writings of the philosophers of modernity, Yuval Harari and Steven Pinker.
In my conversation with Rutendo, she put it plainly: “This is artificial progress — progress towards destruction”. The spasmodic crises we are experiencing are revealing the dystopian nightmare behind the techno-utopian dream, and faith in modernity is riddled with cracks.
Real progress would mean something more practical. It would mean getting honest and facing up to the problems and predicaments of the present. When the obsession with technology and so-called economic “growth” has itself become the impasse — has itself become the thing that keeps modern society mired in chronic social and environmental problems of its own making — real progress would mean stopping doing more of the same.
We need a radical reorientation. We need to stop marching onwards, stop pursuing artificial progress, and turn back for guidance.
I suggest turning each of the tenets of modern progress on its head to find its inverse. Instead of urbanisation, re-ruralisation. Instead of globalisation, localisation. Instead of westernisation, indigenisation.
Instead of faster, slower. Instead of bigger, smaller. Instead of high-tech, low-tech. Instead of artificial intelligence, animate intelligence.
Instead of onwards and upwards, go back and fetch it.
Originally published by Eco-Protagonist Journal on August 12, 2024.
For more information on the Planet Local Summit 2023, visit: https://planet-local-summit.localfutures.org/
Watch the Planet Local Voices episode with Rutendo Ngara here or listen to the podcast here.
Find the full Planet Local Voices series here.
Originally published at https://www.localfutures.org on September 9, 2024.
