As a study of folk literature of different races offers one way of understanding their mental attitude toward life and its problems, the folk literature of the Negro will reveal to us his inherent moral and intellectual bias and the natural trend of his philosophy.  Let us therefore examine some phases of this subject, paying particular attention to that part which relates especially to the proverbs.  The sources of such literature are abundant.  A little research in a well-equipped library brings one into a curious and informing mass of knowledge, ever increasing in bulk, in the French, German and English languages, as well as in many strange and highly inflected African tongues.

A cursory reading of this literature discloses at once that our general knowledge of Africa has been based in the past mainly on those external facts that strike the sense of sight, such as the physical appearance of the population, native dress and handiwork, musical instruments, implements of warfare, and customs peculiar to the social and religious life of the people.  Only through the folk literature, however, can we get a glimpse of the working of the mind of the African Negro.  Professor Henry Drummond, although he had traveled in Africa and had written at length about it, still exhibited a longing for this insight when he observed:  “I have often wished that I could get inside of an African for an afternoon and just see how he looked at things.”  At that time much of the folk literature of that continent was not as now available.  A deeper and more extensive reading of it at present strengthens our belief in the ancient saying “Out of Africa there is always something new,” a rather disquieting thought, if we have reached the conclusion that native culture on that continent has never risen above the zero point.

A critical examination of the content of this folk literature will result in a division somewhat similar to that found in the same type of literature of other races.  Such a division discloses stories, poetry, riddles and proverbs.  The African folk literature is especially rich in proverbs.  So numerous are these proverbs that it has been said that there is scarcely an object presented to the eye, scarcely an idea excited in the mind, but it is accompanied by some sententious aphorism, founded on close observation of man and animals and in many cases of a decidedly moral tendency.  Lord Bacon remarked many years ago that “the genius, wit and spirit of a nation are discovered in its proverbs.”  Cervantes in Don Quixote says “Methinks, Sancho, that there is no proverb that is not true, because they are all judgments drawn from the same experience which is the mother of all knowledge.”  If these sayings be true, then the proverbs of the African Negro should be examined in order to see if they approach these observations.

For convenience of the reader an effort has been made to arrange these sententious sayings under general subjects.  These selected by no means exhaust the mine of African proverbial lore but are only a few nuggets that suggest the Negro’s power to infer and generalize and to express himself in a graphic and concise way relative to life as he observed and experienced it.[1]