Akantu means a little element in Kinyarwanda, a Bantu language. It is also an opensource object-oriented Finite Element library.  It started in 2010 as a platform for the researchers of the Computational Solid Mechanics Laboratory at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne to experiment with different methods of resolution for large scale problems of fracture and contact mechanics. As a consequence, the design principles of the code aim to balance readability, extensibility and performance.