The Akan symbol *Sankofa* — a bird turning its head backward to retrieve an egg — is usually translated as "go back and fetch it." It is often reduced to a slogan about heritage. As a way of doing research, it asks something more demanding.
Much of the methodological canon we inherit in education assumes a particular view of who knows, what counts as evidence, and whose questions matter. A **Sankofa methodological framework** treats African philosophical, epistemological, and ontological worldviews not as objects to be studied, but as foundations from which to design inquiry — drawing on frameworks such as Ubuntu and Ujamaa to centre relationship, community, and collective responsibility in how a study is built and shared back.
Part of that work is a methodology of *refusal*: declining the demand to explain communities to outsiders on extractive terms, and declining research designs that treat Indigenous knowledge as raw material. Looking back is not nostalgia. It is the deliberate recovery of ways of knowing that colonial curricula tried to sever — and carrying them forward into the design of just, community-engaged research.
I take this up in my keynotes and in ongoing writing toward an African-centred decolonial methodological framework. The short version: method is never neutral, and where we choose to look for our foundations shapes everything that follows.