Thursday, February 14, 2013

Why Nobody Uses the Expression "European Proverb"? But "African" is OK to Some.

Photo of three dark-skinned women holding hands and walking a dirt road in the tropics, with the words "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. - African proverb" from the Facebook page Being Liberal.
Photo of three dark-skinned women holding hands and walking a dirt road in the tropics, with the words "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. - African proverb" from the Facebook page Being Liberal.
The above saying sounds nice, but "African proverb" sounds a bit broad. In Europe and Asia we use more precise designations based on language or ethnicity such as "Macedonian proverb" or "Chinese proverb" etc. I've never heard of anyone saying that a proverb is European or Asian. And Africa has much greater diversity of genes, peoples, cultures, and languages than both these continents. Hard to generalize, unless the proverb is generally used by all cultures across the whole continent.

Otherwise, this sounds like colonial mentality. Maybe this is a Fulani or Xhosa proverb, and by taking that part of its identity methinks we go into direction of reinforcing the opinions such as "all Africans are the same," and there's no need to concern ourselves with acknowledging their cultural diversity. 

If you know of a more precise source of this much-quoted inspirational saying, feel free to share it, so we can start correcting all instances of its appearance - together, cause it's a long road.

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