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Appendix
- Caring
- Cooperation
- Community
- Continuity
- Conflict
- Colonialism
- Courage
Contact

Home
About
Appendix
- Caring
- Cooperation
- Community
- Continuity
- Conflict
- Colonialism
- Courage
Contact

Community

It is easier to control a fractured, exhausted, isolated people than a united one. It is for this reason that so much of capitalism and colonialism is built on separating communities – from their families, their customs and cultural frameworks. Wherever your path takes you, if you can help it – don’t travel alone. For safety, for health, and for securing all our greatest achievements – humans always do best in a group.

“The sun never sets without fresh news.”

Unknown, Xhosa

“There are roads out of the secret places within us along which we all must move as we go to touch others.”

Romare Bearden, USA

“The stranger, unfamiliar with the local community and landscape, does not know where the deep water and other hazards are.”

Unknown, Jamaica

“We learn about one another’s culture the same way we learn about sex: in the streets.”

Ishmael Reed, USA

“I’ll never forget going up to Harlem and seeing all those black people. Jesus, just knowing there were that many of us made me feel better.”

Richard Pryor

“The memory of things gone is important to a jazz musician. Things like old folks singing in the moonlight in the back yard on a hot night or something said long ago.”

Louis Armstrong, USA

“The fact is, nothing great or enduring, especially in music, has ever sprung full-fledged and unprecedented from the brain of any master; the best he gives the world he gathers from the hearts of the people, and runs it through the alembic of genius.”

James Weldon Johnson, USA

“I’m not really a songwriter – I’m an interpreter. So in a sense I am an actress first and foremost. I act out the songs, and I lead with my heart.”

Diana Ross, USA

“It is from the blues that all that may be called American music derives its most distinctive characteristic.”

James Weldon Johnson, USA

“If you find a tune that’s got something to do with you, you just feel it, and when you sing it, other people feel it, too.”

Billie Holiday, USA

“…the human mind has not achieved anything greater than the ability to share feelings and thoughts through language.”

James Earl Jones, USA

“I have learned as much about writing about my people by listening to blues and jazz and spirituals as I have by reading novels. The understatements in the tenor saxophone of Lester Young, the crying, haunting, forever searching sounds of John Coltrane, and the softness and violence of Count Basie’s big band —all have fired my imagination as much as anything in literature.”

Ernest Gaines, USA

“The influence which the Negro has exercised on the art of dancing in this country has been almost absolute.”

James Weldon Johnson, USA

“We must never forget that dance is the cradle of Negro music.”

Alain Locke, USA

“God created black people and black people created style.”

George C. Wolfe, USA

“Rap music is powerful because it puts people in the leadership who would not ordinarily be allowed to speak, rap, rhyme, sing or say anything.”

Sister Souljah, USA

“Jazz is not music, it is a way of life, it is a way of being, a way of thinking. I think that the Negro in America is jazz. Everything he does–the slang he uses, the way he walks, the way he talks, his jargon, the new inventive phrases we make up to describe things–all that to me is jazz as much as the music we play.”

Nina Simone, USA

“The same music governs the rhythm of the seasons, the pulse of our heartbeats, the migration of birds, the ebb and flow of ocean tides, the cycles of growth, evolution and dissolution.”

Michael Jackson, USA

“I sometimes realize that there is something on the earth that is free of everything but what created it, and that is the one thing I have been trying to find.”

Ornette Coleman, USA

“Jazz isn’t music merely, it is a spirit that can express itself in almost anything. The true spirit of jazz is a joyous revolt from convention, custom, authority, boredom, even sorrow – from everything that would confine the soul of man and hinder its riding free on the air.”

J. A. Rogers, USA

“Music is one of the closest link-ups with God that we can probably experience. I think it’s a common vibrating tone of the musical notes that holds all life together.”

Marvin Gaye, USA

“Soul music is like electricity – we don’t know what it is, but it’s a force that can light a room.”

Ray Charles, USA

“I wake up from dreams and go, ‘Wow, put this down on paper.’ The whole thing is strange. You hear the words, everything is right there in front of your face. And you say to yourself, ‘I’m sorry, I just didn’t write this. It’s there already.’ That’s why I hate to take credit for the songs I’ve written. I feel that somewhere, someplace, it’s been done and I’m just a courier bringing it into the world.”

Michael Jackson, USA

“Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful.”

Rita Dove, USA

“Maybe our forefathers couldn’t keep their language together when they were taken from Africa, but this, the blues, was a language we invented to let people know we have something to say.”

B.B. King, USA

“Africa for the Africans, at home and abroad.”

Marcus Garvey, USA/Jamaica

“All of our Mercedes Benzes and Halston frocks will not hide our essential failure as a generation of black ‘haves’ who did not protect the black future during our watch.”

Marian Wright Edelman, USA

“Freedom is a collective act of love and courage.”

Beatriz Nascimento, Brazil

“A boat cannot go forward if each rows his own way.”

Unknown, Tanzania

“One head alone does not go into council.”

Unknown, Ghana

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

Unknown, Africa

“The ants said: together we will be able to transport an elephant.”

– Unknown, Mossi

“When a thing becomes perfect, it soon fades.”

Unknown, Morocco

“It is not necessary to blow out the other people’s lantern to let yours shine.”

Unknown, Africa

“Sticks in a bundle are unbreakable.”

Unknown, Africa

“A small house will hold a hundred friends.”

Unknown, Africa

“I’m not a politician. I only want to help relieve the suffering in communities, and I want to help people see their community in each other.”

Russell Simmons, USA

“A canoe does not know who the leader is. When it turns over, everyone gets wet.”

Unknown, Madagascar

“True peace is not merely the absence of tension but the presence of justice and brotherhood.”

Martin Luther King, USA

“The farmer who has never ventured beyond his field says his own methods are the best.”

Unknown, Ewe

“Only someone else can scratch your back.”

Unknown, Kenyan

“I think I have learned that the best way to lift one’s self up is to help someone else.”

Booker T. Washington, USA

“Imagine what a harmonious world it could be if every single person, both young and old, shared a little of what he is good at doing.”

Quincy Jones, USA

“Affluence separates people. Poverty knits ‘em together. You got some sugar, and I don’t; I borrow some of yours. Next month you might not have any flours; well, I’ll give you some of mine.”

Ray Charles, USA.

“Words are sweet, but they never take the place of food.”

Unknown, Igbo

“If you worry about who is going to get credit, you don’t get much work done.”

Dorothy Height, USA

“Rain does not fall on one roof alone.”

Unknown, Cameroon

“The one who is carried does not realize how far away the town is.”

Unknown, Nigeria

“A good friend is better than money in your pocket.”

Unknown, Jamaica

“My mother always told me, ‘Never give up because you never know who’s praying for you.”

Denzel Washington, USA

“The elders of the village are the boundaries.”

Unknown, Ghana

“It takes a whole village to raise one child.”

Unknown, Yoruba

“Choose your neighbors before you buy your house.”

Unknown, Hausa

“The town is a barren wildness to one who is unhappy in one’s home life.”

Unknown, Yoruba

“Sometimes you struggle so hard to feed your family one way, you forget to feed them the other way, with spiritual nourishment. Everybody needs that.”

James Brown, USA

“Seeing me is one thing; coming to live with me is quite another.”

Unknown, Jamaica

“If you have no relatives, get married.”

Unknown, Egypt

“He who earns calamity, eats it with his family.”

Unknown, Africa

“If you educate a man, you educate one person. If you educate a woman, you educate a whole family.”

Unknown, Fanti

“If I am in harmony with my family, that’s success.”

Unknown, Africa

“A family tie is like a tree, it can bend but it cannot break.”

African

“A united family eats from the same plate.”

Unknown, Africa

“Affairs of the home should not be discussed in the public square.”

Unknown, Kenya

“It is not the fire in the fireplace which warms the house, but the couple who get along well.”

Unknown, Malagasy Republic

“If relatives help each other, what harm can be done to them?”

Unknown, Ethiopia

“A person who has children does not die.”

Unknown, Nigeria

“The laughter of a child lights up the house.”

Unknown, Tanzania

“Children are the reward of life.”

Unknown, Congo

“Send a boy where he wants to go, and you see his best pace.”

Unknown, Africa

“The most important question in the world is, ‘Why is the child crying?’”

Alice Walker

“Your children need your presence more than your presents.”

Jesse Jackson, USA

“A child is what you put into him.”

Unknown, Africa

“If you are a parent, recognize that it is the most important calling and rewarding challenge you have. What you do every day, what you say and how you act, will do more to shape the future of America than any other factor.”

Marian Wright Edelman, USA

“When you show the child the moon, it sees only your finger.”

Unknown, Africa

“A child one does not instruct on return, one instructs him when going.”

Unknown, Bantu

“By crawling, a child learns to stand.”

Unknown, Hausa

“A young bird knows nothing about storms.”

Unknown, Jamaica

“The baby at the mother’s back does not know the journey is far!”

Unknown, Africa

“No matter how big a child is, he cannot deny that he was once carried on the back of a woman.”

Unknown, Africa

“The new broom sweeps clean, but the old broom knows the corners.”

Unknown, Jamaica

“Mom and dad would tell … humorous tales of their own escapades. They took life and broke it up in little pieces and fed it to us like little birds.”

Ossie Davis, USA

“When you follow in the path of your father, you learn to walk like him.”

Unknown, Ashanti

“The older the moon, the brighter it shines. The older the clock, the faster it winds.”

Unknown, Jamaica

“The words of the elders become sweet someday.”

Unknown, Malawi

“We must cherish our elders. We must revere their wisdom, appreciate their insight, love the humanity of their words.”

Alice Walker, USA

Acknowledgements

Copyright, Jonathan McDougall 2024

Thanks to Oluwatobi Ajimoko, Kristen Cain, and Kendra Johnson for assistance in compilation and editing, to Ariane Barboza for Brazilian proverbs, and to Liana Alston for editorial suggestions.

Biblography

Joselyn Pine, Book of African-American Quotations (2010)
Gerd de Ley, The Book of African Proverbs (2019)
Maryn Liles, 150 of the Best African Proverbs About Life, Love and Family That Are Full of Poetic Wisdom, Parade (Feb 1, 2023)
African Proverbs, No Sweat Shakespeare (last accessed February 14, 2024)

African Manners
The Wisdom of African Proverbs-Get Inspired From 300 African Proverbs From All Around the Continent, Safari Junkie (last accessed Feb 14, 2024
Quora
Reginald McKnight, African American Wisdom (1994)

Vivien Morris-Brown, The Jamaica Handbook of Proverbs (1993)

Copyright © 2026 Afrodescendant - Griots Wisdom

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