Food and African Proverbs

As a literary category, proverbs participate actively in the communication of culture. One significant way proverbs accomplish the dynamic articulation of culture is through the instrumentality of metaphors and tropes which embed food as a representational site. However, this character of proverbs is not always sufficiently acknowledged in literary/critical discourses. My governing concern here is to engage African proverbs, their referentiality to food/foodways and the significations they secrete in African cultural ontologies. My argument is that proverbs are culture-specific and that inscribed within African proverbs relating to food is a cultural logic which expresses the sociology and anthropology of African peoples and their grammar of mores, values and vision. Many of the proverbs and the food idioms they mobilise negotiate a diversity of cultural themes and preoccupations relevant to the African world in the spatio-temporal continuum. Some of the thematic issues and concerns gesture towards African social histories, cultural cosmologies, political systems, institutional memory, gender relations, religious rites/rituals, politics of the body as well as the ecologies of space. Still some of the proverbs which web into their universe the topicality of food navigate culture through acts of personal arrival, symbolic rites of passage, ethnic or national longing and belonging, moral economies, environmental politics, and power relations. Drawing from the ecology of African proverbs on/about food through ethnographic research and the rigorous reading of some African literary texts in their oral, written and digital manifestations, I hope to demonstrate how proverbs are critical to culture and structure its expressive logic as a means of communication in traditional societies and post/modernity. Some of the texts to serve as analytic paradigms include Djibril Niane’s Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali, Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart, and proverbs I have collected from Facebook.

Keywords: African Proverbs Food/Foodways Cultural Cosmology Digital Manifestations

Author

• Institute of Anglophone and American Studies
  University of Potsdam, Germany
  E-mail: jamestsaaior@gmail.com