Proverbs
by zunguzungu
“Imagine the following equations. Western political philosophy – He that is master of himself will soon be master of others. Hegelian dialectics – one plus one equals two. Newtonian physics – what goes up surely comes down. Marxist philosophy – it takes a village to raise a child. Aesthetics – Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. It doesn’t add up to infantilize Western philosophy like this – Western thought is not immediately reducible to a set of wise sayings. Why is it to so easy to seamlessly move from Western philosophy to African proverbs?
“…in Western philosophy you talk about Antinomy – a logical contradiction – not an oxymoron – because meaning is contained in the clash of its competing claims – An earlier version the Hegelian dialectic. In Zulu culture you have umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu – A person is human being through other people. This concept, usually treated as a proverb is really an antinomy – that is, my humanity is dependent on your humanity, I cannot be a human being alone. The Zulu antinomy is a summation of Ubuntu philosophy, in the same way the movement from thesis, antithesis to synthesis is a summation of the Hegelian dialectic. It is not a proverb.”
zunguzungu 
Not a big fan of Mukoma (or Pambazuka or Pan-Africanism, for that matter) but those are great lines. Still, he does the ol’ Pan-African Two-Step: calls for ‘deeper’ understanding of ‘Africa’ (in this case adding politics to cultural appreciation) while at the same time treating ‘Africa’ (or the West for that matter) as a simple, discrete unit of analysis, infantilizing the continent and the people in the process. And his diss of Madison was dumb as freaking hell, the people there know a ton.
Outside of those lines, I’ll pass. Barrack Obama? Oy…
I’m sure you know Mukoma’s stuff better than I do, so I can’t comment; what I like about this argument is the way he removes proverbs and philosophy from their geographical reference points in order to critique the ways they get used as geographic reference points. I’m thinking about this because of the ways Chris Abani uses proverbs in Graceland, which seems to me to be a kind of critique of that kind of Africanist celebration of the proverb as unit of cultural knowledge (with specific reference to Things Fall Apart). It seems a useful thing to do.
I agree in terms of criticizing of reference points (hence my satisfaction with those two quotes), but what about situations in which proverbs actually exist as a valuable unit of cultural knowledge ie twi (as in you cannot really speak twi unless you know the proverbs)? Now Akan philisophy IS complex as hell and a lot of Twi proverbs are not easily translated universals nor windows into the savage mind, but the critique of Africanist celebrations of basically explaining our common humanity to an audience that might not see it IS a good thing (and this is how I usually view such an excercise, power, subject/object notwithstanding). When Clinton said that it takes a village to raise a child is an African proverb however, all I heard is that Africans all think alike, and that any thoughts they had can be summed up in a sentance. I found it insulting on both counts. Yet there are people WHO are looking for complexity, and a lot of the critiques such as Mukoma’s end up throwing out the baby with the bathwater I feel. Hell, read Ivor Wilks Forests of Gold (which is not perfect, and some of his early chapters say some recockulous things) to see a dude (from the ‘West’) who produces some straight fire.
I mean, what constitutes ‘Western philosophy’ is a few dozen people who thought some deep thoughts and said thoughts were lucky enough to be recorded and discussed. As individuals. Furthermore, it is arguable just how much citizens of ‘Western’ countries are actually heirs to ‘Western’ philosophy, and a lot of people do not engage it in their everday existance so that Mukoma’s simplifications would actually be a massive improvement. My sense of these criticisms is that they are no more than crowd noise in a civilizational footrace (which is a project no one should be part of) rather than proposing either a meaningful alternative or improving the system. It is just a ‘gotcha’ moment.
Also I am moving out of my apartment so I cannot recommend any books on Ghanaian or Nigerian philosophy cause they are packed up (I need a kindle…). I just read Wilks so he was in my head.
That’s interesting. I’ll hopefully get a chance to check Wilks out sometime soon, I need to read more of that sort of thing. And yeah, “Western” in that example is pretty imprecise. In any case, I’m going to post something on Abani at some point, and I think you’ll get a better sense of what made me perk up my ears at that Mukuma bit; I’ll look forward to your take on it.
I read Mukoma, in this instance, to be saying something about genre, loosely defined. Proverb, along with riddles and so on, are supposed to be part of “oral literature,” and their particular slides between story-history-knowledge means that they are always contaminated forms of knowledge (that this is the condition of all knowledge is a whole other argument). In contrast, axioms and aphorisms have a different life–I think, here, of Wittgenstein or Marcus Aurelius, for instance.
It is not an argument against proverbs, but a call to think of how systems of knowledge function and circulate especially in the U.S., and this is why his reference to Madison is interesting. In a way, Winston, I’d say you confirm part of his argument, for the Africanist response has been precisely to privilege the complexity of the proverb in a mostly reactionary way (you didn’t have complex knowledge, yes we did, look at our proverbs). I’m not sure that any U.S.-based scholars can get out of that echo chamber, feedback loop, however we want to characterize it.
I completely confirmed his argument by focusing on Twi, but in attempting to take his statements at face value, I wanted to show how wack they were (and this is a big debate about the nature of doing history in Africa, all the way back from Ibadan/Dar es Salaam). I mean, Wilks has this bomb ass chapter talking about free-trade debates in Kumasi in the 19th century, but that is obviously not the sort of stuff Mukoma has in mind and I wanted to give at least one example of where proverbs are kind of a big deal. I know Spanish, a little French and can dick around with Italian, and I do not know the historical importance of proverbs in those languages (yet, as romance languages, they are all rooted in traditions of great public speaking, which means that Latin and Western languages ARE oral in nature). I should probably consult a European linguist to talk about the nature of proverbs in the West, and while I agree with Mukoma that Europeans and the broader white world has been successful in producing knowledge that subordinates the other, I did not get that his piece was an essay designed to provoke discussion (though it is obviously doing so), but an attempt to damn the U.S. academy. That is fine if you want to do so, hell, I could probably do it as well as he could (alas I could not be an ‘authentic native’, so I lose some points there) but his approach is wishy-washy. He tries to play the part of the concerned scholar problematizing systems of knowledge, but all I could see was just a dude that does not think all that seriously about what he is saying but throwing out salt regardless. I throw out ill-concieved polemics once a month, so trust me, I know them when I see them :).
Do not make me unpack my books and knock out something from the Kano Chronicle (a written history that has SOME philosophy but my knowledge of Hausa is basically non-existant and I have yet to read through a full-translation) or sumsuch, or even throw out just how oral European philosophy actually is (cause Socrates never wrote a damn thing). These sorts of arguments only work if you see the West and Africa as separate and fundamentally distinct units of analysis, which I do not (Africans have oral culture/Westerners have written culture etc). I am too tired to write a full response essay, so whatev.
As for your last statement: I think you are correct, for the forseeable future at least, but I view it as an unavoidable social tax and a fairly minor grievance in the grand scheme of things.
PS Where the hell where you Keguro? I really was curious to hear your take on things. Kenyans always look out for each other, right :)?
Well, you know, I do know Mukoma–this field is, thus, already contaminated.
I wonder, though, to what extent we might get out of the feedback loop and read him to be critiquing Africanist scholars and scholarship and its perpetual “catch up,” “approve me John” (you’ll have to read my blog for that reference) phase, which STILL seems to dominate it, and which drives me nuts. Speaking of genre: of course, his piece was meant to be a provocation, and is serving some purpose, much as Binya’s “How to Write about Africa” is a provocation and continues to serve some purpose. Winston, you could, of course, simply write to Mukoma to ask him what he meant.
I doubt Mukoma qualifies as an “authentic native,” but that’s neither here nor there–I certainly don’t, no matter my citizenship.
Are Africa and “the” west inter-implicated? Of course. But to say that means we also have to negotiate with all the discourses and practices produced by both sides that keep trying to assert some kind of difference. Alas, I was disowned by that country and only agree with my friends, except when I disagree with them.
Philosophy via aphorisms and proverbs –whether Guru Wittgenstein or Nietzsche (or, shall we say, the frat-boy Nietzsche)—differs only slightly in content from the “philosophical” aphorisms and proverbs of Readers’ digest, really. So, I sort of agree with Mukoma wa Ngugi, insofar that he suggests we avoiding reducing “les bon mots de afrique” to a simple slogan. (and we might recall that Hegel however unPC and/or nationalist he seems now, was a fairly consistent abolitionist, and suggested a sort of pan-african congress, early on, and unlike say Guru Wittgenstein, did not lack the historical perspective..).
“Wisdom” lit. from whatever culture has that problem as well, though with say the muslim “hadith”, or the Izmaili-pythagorean sufis (or scripture for that matter), there’s a certain cultural force, quite different than the sort of folk wisdom that many multiculturalists seem preoccupied with: in any country where an abrahamic tradition holds, proverbs–or poesy– are rather secondary to the biblical or koranic text….
Man, I wish I had more to add to this discussion, but — if nothing else — it’s reminded me how much I tend to read African cultural production through the lens of different kinds of state-theory, and of how much stuff that prevents me from having an intelligent opinion about.
That said, it does seem like it’s useful to situate proverbs within the context of their circulation first and foremost; framing it as a generic argument (proverbs do this, philosophy does that) is useful, but only to a point, since the manner in which it is done has everything to do with where and how, and only the most rigid formalist would imagine that the form of the utterance is more important than the use to which it is being put.
For example, a common way of situating proverbs is as “vocabulary”; as Winslow put it, “you cannot really speak twi unless you know the proverbs” and there is something to this, I think; the building blocks of language might be the single word, but the phrase, too, is an incredibly important unit in contsructing a variety of different thoughts. Just as you have to know the meanings of words (and the ways in which their meanings are ambiguous, double, contradictory), you also have to know the meanings of all those little proverbial idioms to speak coherently. It certainly seems to me (though I speak from a position of less knowledge) that some linguistic traditions place greater and lesser emphasis on these units of meaning — which has consequences for how we think about African studies — but it seems more like a quantitative difference than a qualitative one.
There is a lot of really interesting stuff going on in Things Fall Apart with regard to this question: we learn very early on that proverbs are the palm oil with which language is eaten, and the principle of proverbs-as-antinomy is thoroughly woven through the book (Okonkwo’s fate is problematized by reference to the dueling proverbs of “when a man says yes, his chi says yes” and the idea that one’s destiny is a function of one’s chi). But the emphasis is still on a kind of formal determinisms: what we can think is a function of the units we use to think it.
What Chris Abani does Graceland, I think, is to respond to that proverb-as-vocabulary framework by emphasizing the ways our proverbs are a function of our thoughts(instead of our thoughts being a function of our proverbs): in that book, which is explicitly framed as a post-TFA Nigerian novel, I think (and weirdly, Abani once referred to reading TFA to understand Africa as being like reading Gone with the wind to undersatand the USA), Abani puts tremendous emphasis on people’s misuses of proverbs, the ways everyday life requires us to take them as thought-objects to be manipulated and remade. (the productive misreadings of hollywood films that the characters make, for example, gets echoed by the productive mis-uses of proverbs). And I think an implicit apologia for pop culture informs his intervention, too: unlike the “high culture” narratives Achebe was interested in — in which culture is important because it tells us how to think — Abani is interested in pop culture narratives that are not construed that way, so the emphasis is on the ways we tell pop culture how to signify. It’s a limitation of TFA that its main character is so stupid; as such, it simply can’t make the argument for a creative re-interpretive mind (which is why I think Achebe had to rewrite TFA as Arrow of God).