WHEN THE BIRD TURNS BACK
Sankofa cohort 2026 meet with WTIG alumni and friends
There was a time
when every bird knew only one direction—
away.
Away from the forest.
Away from the drum.
Away from the names that first called us home.
Morning still rose over the villages.
Women pounded yam in wooden mortars.
Children chased goats through red earth.
Elders gathered beneath the great baobab,
Where stories ripened with the afternoon shade.
The birds sang from the branches, and everyone
understood their language.
One call promised rain.
Another warned of strangers.
Another welcomed the evening meal.
Then another call came.
The trees heard it first.
The rivers carried it.
The wind carried it farther still.
For centuries the Witness Trees stood in silence,
their roots remembering what the world tried to forget.
They watched babies receive their names.
They listened as elders stitched memory into story.
They stretched their branches over ceremonies of joy,
then over departures no one had chosen.
The birds kept flying.
Always away.
But birds remember.
Akan Sankofa bird
One day the oldest among them rested upon an ancient tree
whose bark had absorbed four hundred years of prayers,
tears, and whispered names.
It turned its head. Then it turned its body , and for the first time in generations,
It faced home.
Today we hear its call.
We search brittle records
and strands of DNA for names history scattered.
We learn songs our grandparents were never allowed to teach.
We dance until forgotten rhythms awaken in our bones.
We prepare the food our ancestors seasoned with memory.
We plant gardens in Detroit,
Atlanta,
Oakland—
not simply to grow food, but to remember that roots still know the way home.
We walk beneath trees
because the earth feels less like property
and more like family.
The bird flies before us.
To Ghana.
To Senegal.
To the rivers.
To the sea.
We stand where chains once silenced countless voices.
We offer libation.
We speak names. We weep.
Not because we are broken,
but because remembrance is our form of healing.
The bird knows what every generation must learn:
You cannot fully know where you are going
until you understand where you have come from.
The slave trade tried to cut the root.
Jim Crow tried to poison the soil.
Distance scattered the seeds.
Still, the roots remembered the rain.
Still, they reached toward light.
Witness Tree’s Sankofa Cohort 2026 with Dance Professor Kofi Antonio and team
Perhaps the greatest gift one human being can offer
Is the chance to recover a name, to reclaim a story,
To discover that history may scatter a people,
Yet it cannot erase the path home.
The bird called.
This time,
We turned.
And beneath the ancient Witness Trees,
Our names remembered who we are.
Abigail Yaa Adoliba is a graduate of Accra College of Education and a Preschool Teacher at Queen’s International School in East Legon, Ghana.