Proverbs, parables and wise sayings are life experiences. In actual fact, these are wisdoms, truths, warnings, morals, experiences and traditional views passed down from generation to generation. These proverbs, parables and wise sayings express the wisdom of African people and are also the resources that are used to understand the Africans past and present lives. In Sierra Leone each ethnic group used proverbs, parables and wise sayings in their conversations as a way of life. The role and importance of proverbs, parables and wise sayings in each ethnic groups conversations provide a colorful and poetic picture of the culture and its characteristics.

Proverbs, parables, and wise sayings are meaningful short sayings or vehicles through which morals are transmitted to adults, youths, and children. They are life experiences that Africans utilized to understand their past and present lives. These means of expressions are vital to the African culture as they transmit wisdom, truth, morals, and lessons that convey traditional views passed down from generation to generation. Africans and mostly older Africans communicate to adults, adolescences, and children by means of proverbs, parables, and wise sayingstransmitting messages, imparting warnings, solving problems, influencing behaviors, helping to avoid unwanted outcomes, and shaping or molding, especially the children as they journey through life. Proverbs, parables, and wise sayings are the instinctive or spontaneous methods of learning anytime and anywhere through conversations in an African community. As the conversations linger, they are revitalized by these short sayings. These modes keep the African children active and interested in the world around them, as well as their own development. These short sayings, in simple terms, are the daughters of daily-life experiences. They are not explained after they have been expressed; instead, adults, youths, and children used them to improve their communication and listening skills, develop creative imaginative and thinking skills, understand the meaning of life, and be familiar with the element of each proverb that was transmitted. Proverbs, parables, and wise sayings are the oral literature of the Creoles or Krios of Sierra Leone. Each proverb is understood when expressed in ordinary conversation. The role and importance of proverbs, parables, and wise sayings in conversations of each ethnic group of Sierra Leone provide a colorful, vibrant, and poetic picture of the African culture and its characteristics.

This extensive collection of 1755 proverbs spans all regions of the African continent, revealing much about the wisdom, humour, and character of its people and culture. Each proverb is arranged alphabetically by key words and includes the country, province, or tribe of origin. Charmingly illustrated with traditional African art from museums and collections around the world.

“A true classic of world literature . . . A masterpiece that has inspired generations of writers in Nigeria, across Africa, and around the world.” —Barack Obama “African literature is incomplete and unthinkable without the works of Chinua Achebe.” —Toni Morrison Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read Things Fall Apart is the first of three novels in Chinua Achebe's critically acclaimed African Trilogy. It is a classic narrative about Africa's cataclysmic encounter with Europe as it establishes a colonial presence on the continent. Told through the fictional experiences of Okonkwo, a wealthy and fearless Igbo warrior of Umuofia in the late 1800s, Things Fall Apart explores one man's futile resistance to the devaluing of his Igbo traditions by British political andreligious forces and his despair as his community capitulates to the powerful new order. With more than 20 million copies sold and translated into fifty-seven languages, Things Fall Apart provides one of the most illuminating and permanent monuments to African experience. Achebe does not only capture life in a pre-colonial African village, he conveys the tragedy of the loss of that world while broadening our understanding of our contemporary realities.

Ruth Finnegan's Oral Literature in Africa was first published in 1970, and since then has been widely praised as one of the most important books in its field. Based on years of fieldwork, the study traces the history of storytelling across the continent of Africa. This revised edition makes Finnegan's ground-breaking research available to the next generation of scholars. It includes a new introduction, additional images and an updated bibliography, as well as its original chapters on poetry, prose, "drum language" and drama, and an overview of the social, linguistic and historical background of oral literature in Africa. This book is the first volume in the World Oral Literature Series, an ongoing collaboration between OBP and World Oral Literature Project. A free online archive of recordings and photographs that Finnegan made during her fieldwork in the late 1960s is hosted by the World Oral Literature Project (http: //www.oralliterature.org/collections/rfinnegan001.html) and can also be accessed from publisher's website.

Providing an excellent example of why folk artists can be appreciated as carriers of knowledge, even if they are unaware of it, this book could change the ways we understand and appreciate American folk arts. Connecting a sharecropper from Georgia in the Southern United States to a protector and healer in Touba, Senegal, West Africa, the holy city of Mouridism, and the final resting place of its founder, Shaikh Ahmadou Bàmba Mbàcke, it makes an interesting link while examining the cultural aspects of two very different and yet similar paths of life. Historians and art historians alike will find this investigation of African American art and folk culture both interesting and insightful. Not only does this book trace the characteristics of art through the African Diaspora, but it also traces Islam through those same diasporic transportations of colonial exploration and slavery.

Reflects what traditional proverbs used in Christian catechetical, liturgical, and ritual contexts reveal about Tanzanian appropriations of and interpretations of Christianity.