African Proverbs: Kru proverbs from Liberia

Along with folktales of all kinds, proverbs are another special interest of mine, and one of the most exciting things about learning more about Africa and African traditions is learning about African proverbs.

Given the thousands upon thousands of African proverbs that have been translated into English and published in books and articles, I need some way to focus my collecting. So, no surprise, I have decided to focus on African proverbs that feature animals. (No surprise because my favorite stories are also the ones about animals.)

So, I started reading and taking notes today, and just by chance the first article I grabbed was Kru Proverbs from Liberia collected by anthropologist Melville Herskovits and his Kru colleague, Sie Tagbwe, as published in the Journal of American Folklore in 1930 (with a very moving tribute to Mr. Tagbwe who died shortly before the article was published). 

It's an exemplary collection: there are 199 proverbs, each with the Kru language version (more about the Kru people), an interlinear English translation, a more free English translation, plus a detailed commentary from Mr. Tagbwe to explain the meanings of the proverbs. I'm taking notes in a Google Doc for all the proverbs that mention animals; so far, that is almost half of the proverbs, or 25 out of 61 (I still have lots more to read!).

Of those 25 proverbs, there were 10 that seemed to me people would enjoy without lots of detailed notes about the cultural context, so I made Google Slides for each of those with an image of the animal, the proverb in English, plus a sort of footnote at the bottom of the slide containing information about the source plus a link to my Google Doc, along with the image credit, and a sentence or two of commentary if needed, especially if I changed the wording of the English. Here's the slideshow, and I've embedded that also in the sidebar of this blog down at the bottom:

I've also created a Padlet where I am putting the slides since that is a way to "see" all the slides at once (you can then click on an item in the Padlet and it will display at full size). Here's a link to the Padlet.

The main reason, though, for making the Padlet is so that I can have an RSS feed. That means as I add the new items to the Padlet, they show up in Inoreader, which means they also show up in the RSS feed on my homepage at LauraGibbs.net:

So, that's the overall plan for how I will be working on African animal proverbs along with the work I'm already doing on African folktales too. I may adjust the routine as I go along, but right now it's feeling pretty good. I promise hundreds more to come!

Meanwhile, I'm taking it as a kind of cosmic sign that I picked this article about Kru proverbs to get me started because it turns out the Kru people have a very distinctive style of animal proverb. There are proverbs that use imagery, just as you would expect. For example: It doesn't do any good to strike the ground after the snake has passed. You have to see opportunity in the moment; if you wait, it will slither away, quick as a snake slithers away.

But here's something really fascinating: in addition to proverbs with animal imagery, the Kru people also tells proverbs that are presented as "so-and-so" says proverbs, like this: Dog says, "Because I beg for food, I can't speak my mind." The meaning of the proverb is basically like the English "Beggars can't be choosers," but the proverb has a totally different feel to it by being presented in the animal's words.

As the article explains, this "(animal) says" is a distinctive Kru style of proverb. Of the 61 proverbs, I've read so far, 15 are in this "(animal) says" style. I'm excited to keep reading through the rest of the proverbs to see how many more of them I will find!

I'll be back with another post as I continue to work my way through this beautiful collection of proverbs. :-)

African Folktales at Internet Archive: The Night Has Ears

Most of the books I'm featuring in this series of Internet Archive African folklore posts are books of folktales, but there are other genres I will want to feature also, such as riddles, and starting today: proverbs! Since I shared a riddle book illustrated by Ashley Bryan earlier — The House with No Door: African Riddle Poems — I thought I would start off the proverb books with one by Ashley Bryan also: The Night Has Ears. Thanks to the marvelous Internet Archive, the book is just a click away with digital lending:

As Bryan opens the book, he explains, "I grew up in a household of proverbs. My mother had a proverb ready for any situation, attitude, or event." (I'll note there that in Bryan's Beautiful Blackbird book, he used his mother's old sewing scissors to create the paper collages used as illustrations there!) Then, as he started doing research into African folktales, he kept finding references to proverbs everywhere. That's been my experience also; many stories include proverbs, and many of the people who collected African folktales also collected proverbs; the two genres go hand-in-hand. 

In this book, Bryan has done a beautiful job of pairing up illustrations and proverbs. Just like in the riddle book, the details of the drawings provide an occasion to think more deeply about the meaning of the proverb. For example, look at this beautiful page with the Yoruba proverb: Patching makes a garment last long. This type of proverb is literally true (which is not always the case with proverbs, like the proverbial watched pot)... but the real power of the proverb is in its application to many things, not just garments. This beautiful illustration of generations is a way to prompt about what it means for things to "last long" and why that is important, and how beautiful patching can be:

Folklorists who study proverbs are called "paremiologists" (from the Greek word for proverbs, paroimia παροιμία), and there is something they call "proverb literacy." Children who grow up surrounded by proverbs, as Ashley Bryan did, gain fluency in proverbs. Those children are able to understand proverbs, learn them, and use them independently. Over time, proverb literacy has been decreasing, and people of all ages find it increasingly hard to "get" what proverbs say, to understand the way that proverbs express meaning. I personally believe that teaching proverbial literacy is one of our most important tasks as educators. Books like this one by Ashley Bryan are a great contribution to that process!

The Night Has Ears: African Proverbs

collected and illustrated by Ashley Bryan

online lending link

I'm using labels at this blog to organize the blog posts, so you can also click on this label Author: Bryan to see the three different books of his that I've featured so far, and that is just the beginning (I am a huge fan of all his work): much more Ashley Bryan to come! I'll just add for now this short video at YouTube: it's Ashley Bryan in action!