Abstract:
Literature in general, just as the other art forms, opens a window into the cultural characteristics of a society. A culture of a particular group is established linguistically through narrative exchange that determines the relevance of belief systems which hold the people together (Finnegan 1970). To understand a culture, particularly one in which orality is still a predominant form of recording history and phenomena, one requires some acquaintance with its oral forms (Nwachuku-Agbada, 1994:194). As a group of people survive in a particular society, they continually foster their own relevant customs through different modes such as proverbs, songs, symbols, folktales and mythologies among others. These literary works express ideas and the concerns of the people at the time. One of such literary types which is well known in literary genre and often used to decode the culture of a people is proverbs. These proverbs often connote (historical) antecedents, customs, as well as the hopes, desires and fears of the people. This thesis therefore analyzed the proverbs in Things Fall Apart1 (henceforth) TFA and Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali2 (Sundiata for short) for an understanding of the Igbo and Mande cultures.
