African Folklore: An Encyclopedia - Marshalls University

African Americans 339
Proverbs in Africa employ indirection to vent anger, reproach, or instruct. In a
pioneering work of proverb scholarship based on field research with a Kru informant
from Liberia living in Chicago, Herskovits examined the situations in which proverbs are
used and tied their meaning to context. Among the Kru, proverbs are used to correct
children and warn them of proscribed behavior, rebuke wrongdoing adults, comment on
“current happenings,” insult a non-family member, “settle disputes,” and “commiserate a
relative or friend on ill-fortune” (1930, 228).
Writing in general terms about proverbs throughout Africa, Herskovits observed that
in native courts they are cited in a similar way as legal precedents in European courts
(1935, 230). He viewed proverbs as primary vehicles for the moral education of African
young people, teaching what is right and wrong and pointing to basic values (1961, 453).
Animal tales are likewise used for moral education. The trickster character teaches that
“wisdom and perspicacity are better than strength, that the old are wiser than the young,
that malice often brings about destruction, that impetuousness is dangerous, that
obedience is rewarded, and other moral precepts of like character” (1935, 228).
Riddles in Africa have different meanings for the young and older people. Double
entendre, also used extensively in narrative forms, is especially prevalent in riddles,
where the “skilled use of the hidden obscenities” are not understood by children. In
Dahomey the Herskovitses found the double entendre was especially important when
riddling was practiced during rites for the dead, since it gave the deceased so much
pleasure when they were alive. Dahomean Narrative also described the distinctive
stylistic characteristics of riddles: their use of exaggeration and their references to the
grotesque, and the forbidden. While some riddles are metrical and in couplets, others are
told in everyday speech.
Dahomean Narrative contained an unusually comprehensive account of the variety of
forms found in Dahomey. Through the treatment of a wide range of narratives,
Dahomean Narrative departed from most previous works on African folklore, which had
concentrated upon animal tales. The Herskovitses described in detail the system of
naming and classifying narratives used by the Dahomeans themselves. The two broad
categories of narratives include the hwenoho, “time-old story…translated variously as
history, as traditional history, or as ancient history” and the heho, or “tale” (1958, 14–15).
In planning his first trip to West Africa, Herskovits expected that Dahomean culture
would represent a baseline for his studies of the retention of African traditions in the
Americas. He was drawn to its relatively unacculturated character, due to its having been
“almost less affected than any other by the circumstances of European control” (1967
[1937]: vol. 1, i), and its significance as a primary source culture for Africans in the
Americas who retained Africanisms. Herskovits recognized, however, that the cultures of
Africans in the Americas varied greatly in their extent of African retention. For example,
centuries of isolation among the Maroons of Suriname resulted in a “culture that is more
African than the West African cultures of today,” (NUHP, MJH/Elsie Clews Parsons,
11/11/29), on one extreme of what he would later call a “scale of intensity of
Africanisms” (1966 [1945], 51). West Africans, shown photographs of Maroon material
culture, were startled that traditions preserved in the New World were forgotten in Africa
(SCHP, West Africa Diary, 3/ 21/21).
In Dahomey, the Herskovitses saw how folklore incorporated cultural change brought
about by colonization. Dahomey: An Ancient African Kingdom, published in 1937,