East African Proverbs

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. I saw the most amazing play the other day.

Oh, yeah?

It was called Our Lady of Kabeho.

Kabeho.

Kabeho, which is in Rwanda. And it’s based on the true story that takes place in the 1980s of these girls at a Catholic boarding school there in the town of Kabeho. They start having visions of the Virgin Mary, and eventually they become local celebrities, and they start having these darker visions, and they could be interpreted to have been a premonition of the genocide in 1994. And I have to say, Grant, the play itself is thrilling. It’s astonishing. It’s gorgeous, as was the production here at Moxie Theater in San Diego, which just ended its run.

And the playwright, Katori Hall, spent a lot of time in Rwanda researching the play. And I bring it up because there are several times in the play, Our Lady of Cabejo, where the characters speak in proverbs. And that reminded me of discussions we’ve had here before about how in a lot of cultures, proverbs are much more woven into the fabric of everyday conversation.

And so I got a copy of the script and I wanted to share a couple of the proverbs there that I really like. A lot of them in the play are about power. And this one goes, a flea can bother a a flea can bother a lion, but a lion cannot bother a flea.

That’s a good one.

Yeah, something that’s small can be really irritating to something much larger, but not necessarily the other way around.

And then the other one that I really liked was, when two elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers.

Oh, I’ve heard that one before, yeah.

Yeah, isn’t that a good one?

The bystanders is always, right?

Right, right, or the poor in the middle of all this other conflict.

So I’ve collected some more East African proverbs, and I’ll share them later in the show.

Very good.

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