Africa at the Internet Archive: Proverbs of West Africa

Today is the final proverbs post in this week of proverbs, and I am excited about the book I'm featuring today because I transcribed the book myself and uploaded it to the Internet Archive. Here's the book: Proverbs of West Africa: Wit and Wisdom of the Bantu Tribes, by C. J. Bender.

Until a few days ago, Bender's proverb book was not available at Internet Archive, but I put it there! I had acquired a copy of this from a used bookstore, and it just recently entered the public domain: because the book was published in 1924, that means it is no longer subject to U.S. copyright law. That made it possible for me to transcribe the book, and then upload it to Internet Archive so that everybody can have access!

The way I did this was just to type out the book. I couldn't scan the pages because the booklet is very fragile, and the scanner we have at home is only for loose pages, not for books. You can see how the Internet Archive scans books; it's amazing to watch:

At the Internet Archive, this is how we digitize a book.

We never destroy a book by cutting off its binding.
Instead, we digitize it the hard way--one page at a time.#digitalbooks pic.twitter.com/ZqPw3w41I5

— Internet Archive (@internetarchive) February 6, 2021

Anyway, I enjoy typing, and the book is not long, so typing it was easy; the book turned out to be 5700 words long. I did a more-or-less "diplomatic" transcription as it's called. There were a few minor typos (punctuation, not in the actual words), so I did not correct those minor errors but just typed them as I found them. I typed it as a GoogleDoc (which is also public), exported it as a PDF, and then uploaded it to the Internet Archive; the upload option is in the upper right-hand corner. They walk you through the process step by step; it's really easy!

When you first upload the file, it doesn't process right away. I uploaded the file before I went to bed one night, and the next morning, it had processed: you can page through my PDF document just like you page through any of the books at the Internet Archive! 

It's even searchable: how awesome is that? Here are elephants:

I should also note that Bender is also the author of a very useful collection of folktales that he collected during his 20 years as a missionary in Cameroon: African Jungle Tales. This book is not available at the Internet Archive, but it is available at Hathi Trust. Like the book of proverbs, this is part of the "Little Blue Book" series of missionary publications from the early 20th-century.

Bender's little book of proverbs is also available at Hathi Trust, but they are not as user-friendly as Internet Archive (they don't let you download the whole book as a PDF unless you are a member of one of their participating institutions, etc.). So, now Bender's book is both at Internet Archive and at Hathi Trust, and I also learned how to add documents to Internet Archive. Yay!

Proverbs of West Africa:

Wit and Wisdom of the Bantu Tribes

by C. J. Bender

Next step: I want to upload all the books I have published with Pressbooks and also books I published independently as PDFs before I discovered Pressbooks. That is going to be fun to do, book by book! :-)

Meanwhile, I'm also working on an African proverbs project, picking out favorite proverbs to illustrate on slides. You can see how that is taking shape at my other blog: African Proverbs. Slowly but surely, they are starting to accumulate. You can see a full-screen view of the slideshow, or an embedded version below:

Africa at the Internet Archive: Love Proverbs / Proverbs on Women

Carrying on with this week of proverbs, I've got a really interesting pair of books for today. The first one is Treasury of African Love: Poems and Proverbs by Nicholas Awde.

The book has facing text of the African language texts and the English translation, and there is a wide range of proverb traditions, in addition to all the love poetry (click the images for a larger view).

Nick Awde grew up in Nigeria; you can find out more about him at Wikipedia. He is also the author of a book of Indian love poetry which you can read at the Internet Archive (this is interesting for me, because I've spent many years studying Indian storytelling also): Treasury of Indian Love: Poems and Proverbs from the Indian Subcontinent. This is also a facing-text book with the original languages and English translation (it's part of a whole series of love books published by Hippocrene).

The other book I want to share today provides a comparative and critical perspective on African proverbs about women: Source of All Evil: African Proverbs and Sayings on Women by Mineke Schipper.

You can find out more about Schipper's work in comparative literary studies at Wikipedia, and you can also find more of her books at the Internet Archive, including other books in African studies.

While the focus of this book is specifically on proverbs about women, the introduction provides a great overview of proverb studies in general and the ways that proverbs can exert a conservative force, even a strongly conservative force, while also creating spaces for oblique voices from the margins.

The book does not contain the original language versions, but it does a good job with providing some notes and commentary to contextualize the proverbs, as you can see here in this screenshot from the section on proverbs about older women (click the image to enlarge):

I've got one more day of proverb posts for tomorrow, and I hope these books are inspiring people to see that even though proverbs are small, they are hugely fascinating!

Treasury of African Love:

Poems and Proverbs

by Nicholas Awde

Source of All Evil:

African Proverbs and Sayings on Women

by Mineke Schipper

Africa at the Internet Archive: African Proverbs

For today's African proverb books (see all this week's posts on one page), I've selected two short proverb books available at Internet Archive that are fun for browsing, just getting a sense of the range of proverbs and how they work. 

The first is a new-ish book from 2003, published in South Africa: Words to the Wise: A Collection of African Proverbs by Julia Stewart.

The book is organized thematically, and each proverb is identified by affiliation, although there is no bibliography in the back to indicate any of the sources. So, this is a nice book for browsing, but not useful for research purposes.

Stewart is also the author of a much more substantial book (almost 600 pages compared to just 100 pages for the proverbs: Quotable Africa published in 2004. This book is also available at the Internet Archive! It's not related to folklore, but it is certainly a wonderful book to use to expand awareness of African traditions and thinkers: Stewart's Quotable Africa.

Like the proverb book, this one is also organized thematically, but unlike the proverb book it contains an extensive bibliography of sources.

The other proverb book for today, published in 1962, is entitled simply African Proverbs by Charlotte and Wolf Leslau. 

This book is organized by region but, unfortunately, as with Stewart's book, there is no bibliography of sources.

The Leslaus are also the authors of a very enjoyable collection of African folktales published in 1963, but that book also has no indication about sources, which means it makes for fun reading, but often raises questions which are hard to answer since it offers no leads to follow. Here is that book at Internet Archive: African Folk Tales.

Wolf Leslau was a famous African linguist who specialized in the languages of Ehtiopia; you can find out more about him in this obituary: In Memoriam Wolf Leslau. 

I'll be back tomorrow with yet more proverb books to browse and enjoy! :-)

Words to the Wise:
A Collection of African Proverbs

by Julia Stewart.

African Proverbs
by Charlotte and Wolf Leslau

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

Africa at the Internet Archive: Ganda Proverbs / West African Proverbs

I am really excited about doing proverbs this week (see the week's first post from yesterday), and I used this occasion to rev up my old African proverbs project. Which means I started a new blog (I love blogs); this is also the blog I'll be using for NaNoWriMo next month, so it felt good to get that up and running: OER Stories and Proverbs. So, if you check out the little slideshow down at the bottom of the sidebar of this blog, you'll see it has a new set of proverb slides, and it will keep growing. This week is really helping me get organized with that and build some momentum. :-)

I've got three proverb items today from the Internet Archive that I wanted to feature, starting with this really fascinating book: African Proverbs and Proverbial Names by Jonathan Musere, which is a study of Ganda proverbs and names.

What the author has done is to take material from Luganda Proverbs by Ferdinand Walser and other books of Ganda proverbs (more about the Baganda people), and the organized that information around the tradition of proverbial personal names. 

Make sure to read the introduction where the author explains the presentation of the material which has the Luganda text, then a literal English translation, followed by a commentary on the meaning, and then personal names which echo the proverb in some way. Here's just one example (click for larger view):

The author notes that a similar project could be undertaken for the names in many different African traditions, so perhaps this model for Ganda proverbs and names will inspire similar projects for other African traditions! The introduction also contains a detailed review of all the proverb sources used in the book in addition to the monumental collection published by Walser, a book which is very hard to come by, making Musere's book even more useful: I am so glad there is a copy everyone can access at the Internet Archive.

This next book is very short, really an article rather than a book, but it provides a great model for how to approach the different dimensions of proverbs: An Analysis of the Proverbs the Yorubans Live By by Ezekiel Tunde Bolaji and Taye A. Kehinde and published by ERIC (Educational Resources Information Center):

Here is the model the authors use in their presentation and analysis of the 16 Yoruba proverbs included in the study, all of which are related to health education (click for larger view).

So, for each proverb they provide the Yoruba text and a literal English translation, plus three different dimensions to consider, what they call the temporal meaning, the semantic or implied meaning, and also the application that can result from sharing the proverb (click for larger view):

Very few proverb collections work through each proverb in that kind of detail, which makes an article like this very useful. Learning how to interpret proverbs is partly based on knowledge of the culture but it is also based on some interpretive moves that you can learn and practice, much like practicing your skills at poetry, music, or any other art form. Reading through the analyses of proverbs like this is a great way to build your proverb-understanding skills!

Finally, the third book I want to mention today is another classic public domain text, by the famous explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton: Wit and Wisdom From West Africa; or, a Book of Proverbial Philosophy, Idioms, Enigmas, and Laconisms.

This book was published in 1865 (and Burton actually completed the work in 1863), making it one of the early contributions to "native African literature" whose mere existence many white people denied at the time; Burton's defense of African cultural arts in the introduction gives a sense of what the debate was like at that time. (More about Burton's wide-ranging career in Africa.)

Burton compiled the book from the linguistic publications available at the time (and which are quite difficult to obtain now), resulting in over 2000 proverbs: appx. 200 in Wolof, 100 in Kanuri, 300 in Ashanti (Oji), 200 in Ga, 600 in Yoruba, 800 in Efik, along with smaller collections in other languages of western Africa. Each proverb has the original language plus an English translation. 

Burton's does not have the great apparatus of commentary like in Musere's book, for example, but nevertheless it is extremely valuable, especially in having the original languages. There are also occasional bits of commentary as you can see here. 

Because the original language is quoted, you can tell that the Wolof proverb about the wolf is not really about a wolf at all; it is about a hyena, bouki. I can't speak Wolof, but I am trying to learn as many animal names in as many African languages as I can so that when English translators mistake the African animals (as often happens, especially with animals not found in Europe), I can recognize the name of the hyena, bouki, and bay is the goat.

So, there are thousands of proverbs for you to read and enjoy and ponder in today's books, and there will be more proverb books tomorrow and all this week. :-)

African Proverbs and Proverbial Names

by Jonathan Musere

Wit and Wisdom From West Africa

by Richard Francis Burton

African Folktales at Internet Archive: Hausa / Nupe / Mongo / Ibibio Proverbs

After writing about African epics last week, I'm going to zoom in from big to small, focusing this week on proverbs. I'll be honest: my passion for proverbs is even greater than my passion for fables and stories; one of the reasons I gravitated to the study of fables is because of the close connection between fables and proverbs, which is true all over the world, and in Africa especially. Africa abounds in fable traditions, and it abounds in proverb traditions also, so I will have lots of books to share here in the blog this week.

The best proverb books IMO are the ones that provide the original language version of the proverb together with the translation, ideally along with some interpretation also. Even if you cannot speak the original language, proverbs are so short that you can often get a sense of the linguistic structure of the proverb, seeing the parallelisms, rhyme, etc. So, to get the week started, I'll share four old books of African proverbs that include the original language along with the English translation.

The oldest of the four books dates to 1905: Hausa Proverbs by G. C. Merrick. The book provides the Hausa text and English translation, and many of the proverbs also have some notes to help in interpretation. This book also has a selection of riddles too; there's a close connection between proverb and riddle traditions since both are based on the listener "figuring out" the meaning. You can find out more about the Hausa people of Nigeria at Wikipedia.

The next book is from 1905: Nupe Proverbs by A. W. Banfield. The Nupe people also live in Nigeria; find out more at Wikipedia. Again, you will find the Nupe text here, an English translation, plus occasional commentary:

The third book, from 1921, is: Mongo Proverbs and Fables by E. A. Ruskin. As the title indicates, this book contains proverbs and stories; the commentary on the proverbs here often takes the form of parallel sayings in English and/or French. The Mongo are a Bantu people of central Africa; you can find out more at Wikipedia.

The final book is note dated, but it was published sometime in the early 20th century: The Sayings of the Wise: Ibibio Proverbs and Idioms by Anietie Akpabio. The Ibibio people are also from Nigeria; you can learn more about them at Wikipedia. 

This book is a bit different than the other three in that it was written by an Ibibio speaker for the purpose to teaching Ibibio language to (presumably) British colonial officials. As a result, the book does not feature English translations for all the Ibibio proverbs, but it does offer commentary on many of them, and sometimes provides a translation. So, this book is not as straightforward to use as the other three (which emphasize the English translations), but you can still learn a lot from exploring here.

So, even if you have just a few minutes to explore some proverbs, these books can help. One of the great things about proverbs is that even though they are ultra-short, they can really grab you and make you think about something in a new way. I'll be back tomorrow (and all week!) with more African proverb books to read and explore at the Internet Archive.

Now I'll close this post with some proverb and riddle books I've already written about in earlier posts:

Ashanti Proverbs

by R. S. Rattray

The Night Has Ears: African Proverbs

by Ashley Bryan

Ji-nongo-nongo Means Riddles

by Verna Aardema

The House with No Door:

African Riddle Poems

by Brian Swann and Ashley Bryan