African Proverbs Project How can we make the gospel culturally relevant?

The African Proverbs Project was designed to promote collection, publication and study of African proverbs with particular attention to their relationship to Christian mission, their role in modern Africa and their significance for a number of academic disciplines. The idea for such a project was stimulated by an announcement in 1992 from the Religion Program of The Pew Charitable Trusts inviting grant applications for "international, interdisciplinary collaborative projects in missiology." This project was one of the first two recipients for that type of grant.

The Project was created by an ad hoc working group including Stan Nussbaum (American, coordinator), John Mbiti (Kenyan), Joshua Kudadjie (Ghanaian), John Pobee (Ghanaian), Laurent Nare (Burkinabe), Willem Saayman (South African) and Dan Hoffman (American).

It is important to note that none of the committee members except Fr. Nare are themselves experts who have researched proverbs extensively, though Prof. Mbiti has built a private collection of 1500 Akamba proverbs over some decades. The members were chosen not because of a deep specialist interest in proverbs but because they all see the significance of proverbs in their broader fields and they all have a broad range of contacts through different networks. The role of the committee was to find and encourage the proverb experts, not duplicate or compete with their work.

Similarly the two organizations under whose umbrella the Project operated are not academic centers; they are Christian mission agencies who see this project as integrally related to their broader work. One is Joint Ministry in Africa, which combines the Africa work of two denominations, the United Church of Christ and the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). The other is GMI, an independent evangelical mission agency with a staff of ten persons who raise their own salary support from a broad spectrum of churches and individuals.

[Note: The following section is the statement of the need for the project which was submitted in the original grant proposal.]

Proverbs are the distilled genius of oral cultures, perhaps even an encapsulation of the whole. They identify and dignify a culture, bringing life into wisdom and wisdom into life. Unfortunately their potential value for modern thought and life is little recognized.

Even in Africa itself, proverbs are a vanishing heritage associated mostly with the barefoot, rural world. They seem never to have found a home in the modern world, especially in the imported system of education. The central intellectual problem of Africa today is how to integrate those two worlds rather than leave the next generation spread-eagled between them.

Christian leaders have not yet gone very far toward integrating traditional proverbs with theology in the quest for a genuine African Christian identity. In some extreme cases such as Liberia and Swaziland, missionaries took such a negative view that to this day there is a virtual taboo on the use of any proverb in Christian preaching. Even in places like Ghana and Zambia where the encounter was more favorable, proverbs have not become one of the basic components of theological education. African theological education has been copied from the West, where theologians have never had much more use for proverbs than Martin Luther had for the least analytical and most proverbial book of the New Testament, James (his so-called "epistle of straw").

The required integration of proverbs with modern life is not simply a matter of learning to quote a few proverbs now and then. Careful study is needed at many levels and from various disciplines so that the themes and patterns of proverbs can be recognized, appreciated and evaluated. The complexity and depth of proverbs is one of the reasons they are neglected--researchers know that one cannot base a sound argument on any single proverb without a fairly comprehensive knowledge of the whole proverbial store of a given language.

A considerable body of literature about proverbs exists but it is very patchy. African proverbs are at sixes and sevens with every academic discipline, cutting across the disciplines to deal with the whole of life. With the advent of computers, new possibilities open up for comparative study of vast numbers of proverbs if standard indices are used. How will these indices be agreed and implemented? Which academic discipline will get the proverbial ball rolling, take the bull by the horns, and bell the cat?

If missiologists could bring some of the best African and Western minds together from various disciplines to create tools for research and use of African proverbs, the church, the university and the world would be much the richer. The gospel would be seen to bring more healing and less cultural schizophrenia to Africa, and African wisdom would be more recognized elsewhere. Everybody wins.

The project raised the profile of the African proverb through an integrated set of programs including conferences, new publications by commissioned writers, reprints and the development of research tools. The grant period was July 1993 through June 1996.

1. International conferences

Two five-day conferences were sponsored by the project. The first focused on the relationship of African proverbs and African Christianity. Seventeen theologians and educators gathered at Ricatla Theological Seminary near Maputo, Mozambique in March 1995. John Pobee chaired the consultation and edited the papers, which are included on this CD as Proverbs and African Christianity.

The other conference involved historians, philosophers, cultural researchers, theologians and people from several other disciplines. Hosted by the Missiology Department of the University of South Africa, this event brought more than thirty presenters to Pretoria in October 1995. Willem Saayman chaired the consultation and edited the papers, which are included on this CD as Embracing the Baobab Tree

2. New publications by commissioned writers

Writers were recruited and commissioned to produce three kinds of works -- academic, pastoral and conservationist.

A. The African Proverbs Series (five writers)

Drawing on the experience of many previous writers, the project attempted to produce a model series of proverb collections presenting and annotating proverbs in a standard format serviceable for both popular and academic use. This effort included a system of categorizing proverbs which was followed fairly consistently though not legalistically in the five books. Under the supervision of Series Editor John Mbiti, the writers represented Ethiopia, Ghana, Uganda, Lesotho and Burkina Faso. The collections range from about 500 to about 1500 proverbs. At the time of this writing, manuscripts are with publishers in South Africa, Ghana and Nigeria; Kenya, USA and UK may be added to the list.

B. Proverbs for Preaching and Teaching Series (three writers)

The purpose of this series was much narrower -- to encourage the use of African proverbs as aids to Christian moral instruction. These are intended as textbooks in Bible institutes and seminaries, as well as resources for church leaders. Each book contains an introductory chapter comparing and contrasting the values of African proverbs and the Bible. The body is an explanation of 100 to 200 local proverbs, showing how each could be used in Christian instruction. Only one book was ready for inclusion on the CD, the one from Series Editor Joshua Kudadjie of Ghana. The other two from Malawi and Liberia are nearly complete at the time of this writing. Each book is to be printed in or near the relevant country in English and the local language. Publication of the translations in additional countries is not subsidized but may nevertheless occur.

C. "Endangered Proverbs" Series (six writers)

The aim here was to produce lists of at least 100 proverbs from languages where little or nothing had previously or recently been written. Such languages abound in Africa, but a society's knowledge of its own proverbs may dwindle like the elephants and rhinos. Three lists were made in Burkina Faso and one each in Togo, South Africa and Tanzania. The average is about 400 proverbs per language; French or English translations are included. The project did not pay for printed publication of these; some would require further editing before that would be feasible. However, the existence of ANY list of proverbs can be a starting point from which a researcher may eventually produce a significant work.

3. Reprints

In order to make proverbs more widely available at little cost, our project CD included reprints of several classic proverb collections and several recent ones which were available without royalty payments. Over 25,000 proverbs from at least 27 different languages were brought together this way. The largest of the reprinted collections are in Luganda, Oromo (Ethiopia), Twi or Akan (Ghana) and Swahili (East Africa).

It is not only size which makes a book significant for reprinting. For example, George Cotter did a brilliant piece of work connecting Oromo proverbs (with English translations and explanations) to the texts of the four Gospels, but the work had an Oromo title and remained almost unknown outside Ethiopia. Publication on CD will bring this work to the attention of people worldwide, some of whom may be inspired to attempt similar things in other languages such as Yoruba, Igbo, Swahili and Malagasy which have very extensive proverb collections on which to draw.

Reprinting sometimes involves repackaging and updating, as it did with Prof. Wolfgang Mieder's bibliography. His three-volume annotated bibliography of international proverb scholarship contained about 10% African material, but African libraries could not afford the set and the first volume was out of print anyway. At our request he extracted the Africa material, updated it and produced the volume, African Proverb Scholarship: An Annotated Bibliography. We printed it in 1994 and reproduced it on the CD, making this valuable resource much more widely available.

4. Development of research tools

A. Bibliography of African proverb collections

The most basic and perhaps most daunting challenge facing a proverb researcher in any African language is the challenge of finding out what has already been published about proverbs in that language. The literature is spread all over, it occurs in a variety of languages and journals as well as in appendices or chapters of books on other subjects. It may be surviving only as an unpublished manuscript in an archive or an attic. Our project set out to compile a bibliography which would reduce this basic difficulty in proverb research.

Using other bibliographies such as Bonser, Moll, Gorog, Scheub, and the World Bibliographical Series, library catalogs at Hekima College, Nairobi; University of South Africa, Pretoria; School of Oriental and African Studies, London; Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois; Billy Graham Center Library, Wheaton, Illinois; University of Illinois, Urbana, as well as a wide network of personal contacts, we compiled a bibliography of over 800 proverb collections. The distressing thing was that even at the end of our work, we were constantly running into a fairly high percentage of titles which had not occurred in any list we had previously seen. We are sure there is much more to be found and we hope the inadequacies of our list will rouse others to improve on it. Double-click here to see it.

The presentation of the bibliography on CD rather than in print opened a new world of research facilitation. Hypertext software can rearrange the data in a variety of ways. For example, if one wants to see and print only the references to collections in French, or about Zulu, or about Cameroon, this is no problem. The labor of searching and copying is virtually eliminated.

B. Key pages

Once a researcher has a bibliographic reference, the next thing he/she would like is a glance at the book itself. With a few reprints we have made this possible, but for a much larger number (about 200 titles) we used a new method we call "key pages." These are the few pages from each book that we believe are the first ones the researcher would go to if the book itself were available -- the title page, the contents, the introduction, a page or two of the body, the bibliography. By looking at these "key pages" of a book on the computer, the researcher can determine how much effort should be made to get access to a copy of the complete work.

C. Maps

Given the bibliographic work we had compiled and a recently computerized map of African languages, we were able to produce maps showing the state of proverb research in each language and each country. Four colors on the map represent "well documented," "somewhat documented," "poorly documented," and "no known documentation." A popup window shows the data table from which the maps were derived. Another popup lists the languages which are not labelled on the map, i.e., the languages in which no proverb collections have been published as far as we know.

The maps were also produced on paper for distribution to regional research centers in Africa (see below). They provide a vivid stimulus for further research.

D. A biographical directory

Any researcher is eager to know who else is working or has worked on his/her area or topic. To help meet this need we have begun a Directory of African Proverb Collectors and Researchers, arranged by country or language. There are about 65 names in the directory so far. Many of these are people who began to get acquainted through our conferences.

E. A directory of African languages

The Ethnologue is a list, classification and description of the world's languages which has been continuously updated by SIL (Summer Institute of Linguistics) for over forty years. It became available to us electronically; we extracted the African material from it and got permission to include it on the CD.

The directory includes variant names and spellings, dialect names, a language family tree, population and location for about 1500 languages. The QUERY function of the hypertext software allows researchers to see all languages which belong to the same branch or sub-branch of the tree as a language of their interest. For anyone who has to identify or locate languages continent-wide as we did for our bibliography, the directory is a huge time-saver.

F. Books available for sale

Visiting an American book shop early in the life of this project, I was told that the computer could find exactly one book on African proverbs in print in the USA! There are many more here and elsewhere, but they are not on the computers. One has to know where to look for them. We therefore included on this CD a list of publishers and addresses which we gradually built up during the project. We hope that by publishing this list we will match up more buyers and sellers. Proverb collections deserve much wider publicity than they usually get.

As our project grant ran out and we considered how to pass the torch to other runners, it seemed clear that the key to further research lies not in an international, short-term effort like ours but in regional research centers in Africa which can integrate proverb research with their existing programs. We are discussing this possibility with centers in Ghana, South Africa, Kenya and Cote d'Ivoire at the time of this writing. We envision that various centers would be happy to adopt and take responsibility for some or all of the following objectives concerning proverb study in their country or region.

The African Proverbs Project considers these regional centers to be the key for manageable, long-term continuation of the work our three-year project has begun or encouraged. We believe they can develop as a loose network of centers with common goals of data collection and research promotion. They will determine how much of this work can be integrated into their existing programs without long-term centralized administration or funding. The expectation is that less that 1/5 time for one person would be allocated (though of course more time could be invested if it is available). At the time of writing we are opening discussions with the following institutions which may become regional centers for proverb research, though no firm arrangements have been made:

• Missiology Department, University of South Africa, PO Box 392, Pretoria 0001, South Africa
• African Studies Center, University of Ghana, PO Box 66, Legon, Ghana
• Hekima College Library, PO Box 21215, Nairobi, Kenya
• ICAO (Institute Catholique de l'Afrique de l'Ouest), 08 BP 22, Abidjan 08, Cote d'Ivoire

What the Centers Initially Receive from the African Proverbs Project

• The African Proverbs CD
• The printed versions of published proverb collections we acquired which are relevant to their region 
• Our master copies of "Key Pages" from proverb collections in their region
• Maps:
  
  • A wall map showing proverb research in all languages
  • Six paper copies of the language maps of each country in their region (one to keep and five to donate to centers in each country)

A. Maintain and expand their own holdings of African proverb collections and research.

B. Maintain and expand several data collections begun by the African Proverbs Project:

• "Directory of Proverb Collectors and Researchers"
• "Bibliography of African Proverb Collections"
• "Bibliography of African Proverb Scholarship"
• Data tables for the "Maps of the Status of Proverb Collecting" in each language and country, based on the two bibliographies above
• "Key Pages" (of proverb collections not available in their entirety)

C. Encourage and promote proverb research generally:

• The collection of "endangered proverbs"
• Proverb research as part of existing graduate degree programs
• The writing, production and sale of proverb-related literature
• The development of national or sub-regional centers

D. Network - Maintain contacts with:

• the newsletter on African proverb research produced by the Missiology Department of the University of South Africa
• the other three regional proverb registry centers
• Prof. Mieder and the journal Proverbium
• universities who assisted with the African Proverbs Project (SOAS--London; Northwestern; and the University of Illinois)
• GMI
• any national or sub-national proverb research centers in the region