Africa at the Internet Archive: Speak to the Winds / Wit and Wisdom

For today's week-of-proverbs post (see all this week's posts on one page), I've selected two books from Internet Archive that present the proverbs together with some really great graphic design too. The first one is Speak to the Winds: Proverbs from Africa by Kofi Asare Opoku, with illustrations by Dindga McCannon, just a click away for your reading/viewing pleasure:

The artwork is absolutely gorgeous. For example, here's the illustration for this saying: The hand of the child cannot reach the shelf, nor can the hand of the adult get through the neck of a gourd.

The author is from Ghana, and the illustrator is American. In fact, by a great coincidence, there was an article about her in the New York Times just a few weeks ago: The World Catches Up With Dindga McCannon.

This book does not provide attributions for the proverbs, so this book is more just for reading pleasure rather than for deepening your knowledge about different African cultural traditions, but it is definitely a pleasure both to read and to look at.

The second book is a collection of proverbs from both Africa and the Caribbean: Wit and Wisdom of Africa: Proverbs from Africa and the Caribbean by Patrick Ibekwe, who is from Nigeria, and this book provides information for all the proverbs by origin, bringing together African cultural traditions from, literally, around the world.

Strangely, the illustrator is not credited. Did the book designer do all this graphic work? I'm not sure, but the book is beautifully designed. You can get a sense of the interior from this screenshot; there is no credit given for the sources that inspired the designs, but they really are beautiful (click the image for a larger view):

As the title indicates, this is a collection of proverbs that includes both the traditions of Africa and also the diaspora, as shown in this map at the start of the book, and there is also a good bibliography in the back for the many sources that the authors used to create this collection. 

This book contains thousands of proverbs organized by theme, but there are no indexes, which is why it is so incredibly useful to have the digital version at the Internet Archive since that allows you to do a search. For example, maybe you want to see if there are proverbs about lions... there are! You can even page through the whole book just looking at the lion proverbs (click image for larger view):

I have a copy of Ibekwe's book on my own personal bookshelf, but I am grateful to have the Internet Archive version too so that I can do searches like that as needed, and if you're looking for just one African proverb book to buy to have on your bookshelf, Ibekwe's book is the one I would recommend. He also published a shorter version: The Little Book of African Wisdom.

So, enjoy: thousands of proverbs again await you, along with some beautiful art in today's two books, each just a click away at the Internet Archive:

Speak to the Winds: Proverbs from Africa

by Kofi Asare Opoku

Wit and Wisdom of Africa:

Proverbs from Africa and the Caribbean

by Patrick Ibekwe