About Sankofa

I'm first-generation American, born to Kenyan parents. I grew up hearing stories — about my family's region, our name, traditions that traced back further than anyone could pinpoint exactly. I had more access to my heritage than most people in the diaspora ever get. And still, there were gaps. Entire chapters erased by colonial disruption or simply by time. Names no one alive remembers. Practices that stopped being practiced and eventually stopped being spoken about.

That access is a privilege. For millions of people across West African, Caribbean, and South Asian diasporas, there are no family stories to start from. There's a surname, maybe a country, maybe nothing. The historical record exists — scattered across colonial archives, academic journals, regional oral traditions — but it's inaccessible to the people it belongs to.

Sankofa was built for that gap.

Sankofa is modeled after the West African griot — part historian, part storyteller, part musician, part conscience. Griots are the keepers of oral tradition in communities across Mali, Senegal, Guinea, and the Gambia. They don't recite facts. They weave together verified history, cultural knowledge, and imaginative reconstruction into a living narrative. They control pacing. They know when to pause. And they always make clear what's remembered versus what's felt.

That is the design ethos behind Sankofa. The AI is the griot's voice. The community is the griot's memory. The user is the listener, welcomed into a story that belongs to them.

Sankofa's narratives unfold in three acts. Each act contains interleaved text and AI-generated watercolor imagery — painted in the warm palette of burnt sienna, raw umber, yellow ochre, and gold leaf. Images appear at emotionally resonant moments chosen by the AI, not placed mechanically. Voice narration reads each segment in a warm storytelling voice. Ambient soundscapes — wind, fire, market, drums, nature — cross-fade between acts.

After the story ends, the griot remains. You can ask follow-up questions about what was left out, what the music of the era sounded like, what daily life looked like for the people in your narrative.

Every segment in every narrative carries one of three tags:

Most AI products hide their uncertainty. Sankofa surfaces it. When users see the system being honest about what it knows versus what it imagines, they give it more latitude to imagine. Transparency creates permission. Honesty and immersion are not in tension.

Sankofa will never fabricate specific genealogical claims. It tells the story of a place and a people, not a fictional family tree.

Sankofa is a word in the Akan language of Ghana. It translates literally as “go back and get it” — a teaching that what has been forgotten can still be recovered, and that looking backward is not weakness but wisdom.

The Akan proverb: Se wo were fi na wosankofa a yenkyi. It is not wrong to go back for that which you have forgotten.

Sankofa is often represented as a mythical bird looking backward while its feet face forward, carrying a precious egg in its beak. The egg is the knowledge being recovered.

That bird is the logo at the top of every page. The proverb is the closing line of every story.

• ×Sankofa is not a DNA ancestry test. It doesn't tell you what percentage of your genome traces to which region.
• ×Sankofa is not a genealogy platform. It doesn't build family trees from records.
• ×Sankofa is not a replacement for family. If you have living relatives who carry oral history, talk to them first. Sankofa is for the gaps they can't fill.

Sankofa won the Creative Storytellers category in Google's Gemini Live Agent Challenge, selected from 11,896 participants. It was presented at Google Cloud Next 2026 in Las Vegas.

Sankofa is free for anyone to use for their first story. The mission — making heritage accessible to diaspora communities worldwide — is not compatible with paywalls on the front door.

Future features for returning users (saved heritage libraries, multi-generational narratives, family collaboration) may be paid. The griot will always tell your first story for free.

Sankofa is open source under the AGPL-3.0 license. The code is available at github.com/Jeremiah-Sakuda/Sankofa. Community contributions to the knowledge base are welcome — the griot's memory grows with everyone who gives back to it.