The African Proverbs Project

Date added: 06/07/2016

The Pew Charitable Trusts financed the African Proverbs Project with Dr Stan Nussbaum

as co-ordinator, for three years (1993–1996). He assembled a number of scholars who had

collected and studied proverbs. The purpose of the Project was to encourage further work of collecting,

studying and publishing proverbs. It organised international and interdisciplinary symposia

and embarked on three types of publications.

One kind of publication was the African Proverbs Series, with Prof. John Mbiti as editor. Five

volumes were published in 1997, each with proverbs from respectively Ethiopia, Uganda, Lesotho,

Burkina Faso and Ghana. Their size ranged from 584 to 1 497 proverbs in African languages, with

translations into English or French. Another set of publications with the Rev. Joshua Kudadjie as

editor, covered proverbs for preaching and teaching purposes. Three volumes have come from

Malawi, Ghana and Liberia. The Project also published an annotated bibliography by Prof. Wolfgang

Mieder. The report from one of the symposia appeared in 1997.

The report is published on African Journals Online.

You can read the full article here: http://www.ajol.info/index.php/lex/article/view/51369/40021