Southern Africa

Southern Africa’s proverb traditions are dominated by one idea and are much larger than it. The idea is the one carried by the Nguni maxim umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu and its Sotho-Tswana counterpart motho ke motho ka batho — a person is a person through other people. It has become the most-quoted African philosophical formula in the world, invoked in constitutions, truth commissions, and a great deal of writing that has never looked at the sentence closely. Underneath the citation there is an actual proverb, doing ordinary work in ordinary speech, and the essays filed here try to get back to that.

The languages are mostly Bantu, split into recognizable families. The Nguni group — Zulu, Xhosa, Swazi, Ndebele — shares a great deal of proverb material, sometimes word for word. The Sotho-Tswana group — Sesotho, Setswana, Sepedi — shares its own body, often expressing the same claim with different nouns. Shona and Venda sit apart again, and the Khoekhoe and San languages of the drier southwest belong to entirely separate families with their own oral traditions and a much thinner documentary record.

The imagery is pastoral and juridical at once. Cattle, herding, rain, drought and the kraal supply the pictures; the kgotla and the chief’s court supply the arguments. A striking share of the corpus is about how authority is constituted and limited — who makes a chief, what a leader owes, when the people may withdraw their consent — which is not the register in which most proverb traditions do their political thinking.

Sourcing here requires the same care as anywhere else on the site, and slightly more. The ubuntu material in particular circulates online in dozens of paraphrases with no attribution at all, and a good deal of what is presented as ancestral wisdom was written in English in the 1990s. Essays in this region should pin wording to a documented collection or a named scholarly source.