Proverbs in African Orature: The Aniocha-Igbo Experience (review)

Ambrose Adikamkwu Monye’s Proverbs in African Orature offers a catalog of proverbs spoken among the Aniocha-Igbo of eastern Nigeria. His objective, as he states in the book’s preface, is to “synthesize [the community’s] canons of oral literary criticism and those of the orthodox so as to evolve a new kind of criticism which would be accepted as a paradigm for the criticism of African proverbs in general” (vii). Monye’s lofty goals are matched by his claim of having recorded an impressive 1,649 proverbs among the Aniocha-Igbo, even though only less than a third of the proverbs are included in the appendix. Nevertheless, this documentation of the proverbs—transcribed in the original language with an accompanying English translation—is perhaps the strongest attribute of Proverbs.

The book is divided into four main chapters, with the conclusion serving as the fifth. Chapter one, “Literary Background,” reviews criticism on orality and proverbial usage. In the next chapter, Monye presents a profile of the various verbal performance practices in Aniocha. These include folktale and myth performances, folk drama, and poetry. He notes that proverbs are commonly deployed in such narrative forms as folktales and legends because of their “malleability and epigrammaticality” (sic 43). Curiously, the more common deployment of proverbs in everyday conversations is cursorily mentioned at the conclusion of the chapter.

The third and fourth chapters, “Aniocha Proverbs as Literature” and “Oral Literary Criticism of Aniocha Proverbs,” respectively, are perhaps the more substantive chapters in the book. With the large collection of proverbs, Monye finds illustrations for forms of verbal expression—anecdotes, the parabolic—while identifying poetic devises such as alliteration, simile, metaphor, parallelism, assonance, repetition, etc. into proverbs. But sometimes it appears that Monye overstates, if not mischaracterizes, these devices, especially as they relate to oral performance. For example, after citing the proverb, “‘makana mkpa-akwukwo ma-mma ma ewu atana a, i mali na o buna nke ezigbo e’ (Because if a leaf looks beautiful [edible] and yet goats cannot eat it, you will know that it is not a good [edible] leaf,” he claims that there is an alliterative effect by the “repetition of the letter ‘m’” in the proverb (58). Is alliteration a function of letters or sounds? The fourth chapter where the author reviews modes of oral criticism associated with the performance of proverbs is useful as he demonstrates the unwritten yet understood processes by which listeners and performers of proverbs evaluate and appreciate the success or failure of each verbal deployment. In addition to his own assessment, Monye interviewed five noted speakers in the community. Some of the questions Monye asks his subjects appear banal, like in a follow-up question about a particular proverb posed to Boi Bielonwu where Monye asks, “How can a man grow bigger than his stomach?” ignoring the imagistic quality of proverbs (93).

Monye’s book would benefit those interested in reading proverbs drawn from a specific community; the subjects of the proverbs are varied, ranging from the profound to the sexist to the humorous. But the reader must be prepared to face the author’s tiresome enumerations, classifications and subclassifications, in addition to the innumerable “closer look” that appear on just about every other page.