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West Africa: Proverbs and Evaluation
West Africa: Proverbs and Evaluation
Date distributed (ymd): 000401
Document reposted by APIC
+++++++++++++++++++++Document Profile+++++++++++++++++++++
Region: West Africa
Issue Areas: +economy/development+
Summary Contents:
This posting contains a March 2000 article on participatory
management and local culture, citing West African proverbs as
a sophisticated and locally owned basis for evaluating the
effectiveness of development projects.
+++++++++++++++++end profile++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
APIC Announcement
APIC's Africa Web Bookshop page on Education and Culture
(http://www.africapolicy.org/books/educ.htm) contains links to
several recently published books with collections of African
proverbs. Particularly recommended is the Africa World Press
book edited by Patrick Ibekwe, Wit & Wisdom of Africa (ISBN:
0865437246).
Also published since 1998: Ariel, A Tiny Treasury
of African Proverbs (ISBN:
0836252365);
Ashley Bryan, The
Night Has Ears (ISBN:
0689824270);
Gerd De Ley, African
Proverbs (ISBN:
0781806917);
and Leshama, The Old People Say
(ISBN:
0627022472).
In addition to links to Amazon.com and to sources for Africa
books such as the African Book Collective, the Africa Book
Centre, Africa World Press, and more, the Africa Web Bookshop
has recently added links to leading on-line bookstores in
Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and UK. Just
follow the links at http://www.africapolicy.org/books
Indigenous Knowledge Notes
World Bank
No. 18 March 2000
IK Notes reports periodically on Indigenous Knowledge (IK)
initiatives in Sub-Saharan Africa. It is published by the
Africa Region's Knowledge and Learning Center as part of an
evolving IK partnership between the World Bank, communities,
NGOs, development institutions and multilateral organizations.
The views expressed in this article are those of the authors
and should not be attributed to the World Bank Group or its
partners in this initiative. A webpage on IK is available at
http://www.worldbank.org/afr/ik
Letters, comments, and requests for publications should be
addressed to:
Editor: IK Notes Knowledge and Learning Center, Africa Region,
World Bank 1818 H Street, N. W., Room J5-055 Washington, D. C.
20433 E-mail: pmohan@worldbank.org
Participatory Management and Local Culture : Proverbs and
Paradigms
This article is based on research conducted by local
researchers with the support and technical supervision of
Peter Easton, Associate professor, Graduate Studies in Adult
Education, Florida State University, with the active
collaboration of the concerned African communities. The
research was carried out under the joint aegis of the Club du
Sahel / OECD, the Interstate Committee for Combating Drought
in the Sahel / Comite Inter-etat Contre la Secheresse (CILSS)
and the Association for the Development of Education in
Africa.
Links:
Florida State University Adult Education
http://www.fsu.edu/~coop
Club du Sahel
http://www.oecd.org/sah
CILSS
http://www.cilss.org
Association for the Development of Education in Africa
http://www.fsu.edu/~lv-adea
Evaluation is often considered an activity required by donors
but fundamentally foreign to local culture -- an experience
and a way of thinking that are largely alien, if not downright
threatening, to program beneficiaries and staff alike.
Much has been done in recent years to develop participatory
and empowering modes of program evaluation that give local
staff and stakeholders an active role and a definite say in
how evaluation is carried out and in how its results are
interpreted. Creative ways have been found to reconcile this
popular participation with reasonable rigor in results and
even to increase the reliability, validity and the
representative nature of findings through more substantial
stakeholder input. In addition, there has been increased
recognition that high caliber evaluations of program impact
are necessarily built on careful day-by-day monitoring and
description of actual processes by those involved, and that
the meaning of quantitative results is equivocal at best until
they are interpreted -- sometimes contradictorily --by the
different stakeholder groups concerned.
Evaluation: Outside mandate or local reflex?
All these trends give enhanced importance to local
participation in and "ownership" of evaluation efforts. Yet
they may leave the heart of the matter largely untouched. Are
notions of accountability, performance assessment and databased
decision making outside impositions or do they bear
analogies to "indigenous" concerns? And, if so, what are the
relationships and how are they best tapped to make evaluation
a local tool, an appropriate technology? The question is of no
small significance in an era of increasing "decentralization"
in administration and education, where successful approaches
to genuine self-management are at a premium.
In fact, one of the unanticipated results of participatory
evaluation practice in West Africa has been to bring to light
local attitudes and approaches to evaluation, thus creating a
basis for the development of appropriate evaluation
methodology. And one of the means for that discovery has been
the use of proverbs that encapsulate local attitudes and
insight with regard to evaluation-related issues like
accountability, performance and social responsibility.
Proverbs: Tradition in motion
Throughout the region, proverbs provide a highly condensed,
often poetic window on human experience and on local
understandings of the world. The word for "proverb" itself is
illustrative of the point in many cultural traditions. In the
Hausa language, for example, the term is "karin magana," which
literally means "folded speech." African proverbs are in fact
a finely-wrought form of expression where meanings are tightly
interleaved, creating associations between apparently
disparate realms of experience that throw new light on events
and order perception. No wonder these expressions so often
require, for the uninitiated, what modern criticism would call
careful "unpacking." They can be spare and evocative as a
poem, and as central to establishing shared understandings of
collective phenomena as any political assembly.
African proverbs are both new and old. They scarcely
constitute a fixed canon of wisdom. New ones are being
invented all the time and old ones are falling into disuse, a
constant process of what linguists would call "lexical cre
ativity." At the same time, they are not oracles: for every
proverb, it is said, there is another asserting the opposite
point of view. Proverbs are more like a language of thought.
But they afford a capital means for linking current concerns
with the historical experience of the group and helping to
ensure continuity and coherence in the value systems and
motivations that underlie new initiatives. As an Ewe saying
from eastern Ghana makes clear,
Ka xoxoa nu wogbia yeyea do -- "A new rope is plaited at the
end of the old."
Evaluation and performance
To imagine that there was no accountability for resources at
the local level prior to the intervention of official
development programs is like presuming that no one learned
anything before formal schools were established or that
agriculture was non-existent prior to the arrival of the
extension agent. As a Nigerien proverb reminds us:
Kunkuru ya san makamar matarshi: "The tortoise knows how to
embrace his wife."
In short, certain things may seem incomprehensible to the
outside observer, but insofar as they concern people's
essential health and welfare, you can be sure that those
involved worked out solutions to their at least interim
satisfaction long ago.
Flash back to an evaluation of functional literacy in the
Republic of Mali over two decades ago. In frustration over the
difficulties of tracking a program where advertised results
sometimes seemed leagues away from field-level reality, one of
the members of the team dredged up a proverb from neighboring
Niger that seemed to sum up the situation with trenchant good
humor:
Da an ce da kare tuwo ya yi yawa a gidan biki, ya ce 'Ma gani
a kas!: "When the dog was told that there was food for
everyone at the wedding feast, he replied, 'We'll check that
out at the ground level!'"
In truth, there can be all kinds of nourishment on the table
at a feast, but unless and until it gets down to the ground
the dog has no part in it. So it is with many a development
program: the inflated rhetoric does not much match the
benefits for local participants, and it is just this reality
and disparity that evaluation should help examine.
The interesting point here is not just the pertinence of the
proverb when applied to evaluation concerns, but equally the
fact that its relevance and poignancy were so immediately
understood and appreciated by people of a neighboring ethnic
group. The expression became a sort of motto for the
evaluation.
Accountability and efficiency
Accountability may appear to be another imported notion. But
a Hausa expression of long vintage sums up perspectives
familiar in most West African cultures:
In ba k'ira, me ya ci gawai?: "If nothing has been forged,
then what happened to the charcoal?"
Blacksmithing is still carried on in many areas of West Africa
over charcoal fires. But if that valuable resource is consumed
and nothing is produced, there is real cause for concern.
Effectiveness is likewise a frequent focus. The Beti of
Cameroun put the matter quite simply: Fa e tebe nebai e dugan
a abama: "If the machete doesn't want to cut brush, it had
best sneak back to the sheath."
"Efficiency" itself is scarcely a foreign notion. Numerous
local expressions highlight the problem of social processes
that give poor or no results, the downside of operations where
the ratio of inputs to outputs is 'suboptimal,' to use the
dialect of planners. One of the most colorful comes from the
Wolof language of Senegal. "Ten digging, ten filling -- lots
of dust, no hole." A commentary is scarcely needed!
Collective decision-making
Arguably, evaluation is at its best a form of collective
decision-making about the use of resources and appropriate
goals for community life. Participatory evaluation makes this
goal a leitmotif. And West African culture is extremely rich
in wisdom and insight regarding both the necessity of
cooperation in decision-making and the ways to obtain it. The
Hausa language puts the case in few words:
Shawara d'awkar d'aki. "Making a decision is [like] putting
the roof on a hut." In short, everyone must bend down and lift
together!
An Ewe expression puts another critical spin on the issue, and
one particularly relevant to evaluation: Nunya avemexevie ame
oeka me len o. "Knowledge is like the bird of the forest: one
person alone can never catch it."
At the same time, proverbs frequently make it clear that
differing points of view are an essential component of
decision-making and that nothing is subject to one single
interpretation. Sira kelen sira te, the Malinke people say:
"One way is no way at all."
And the Hausa language has two marvelous ways to illustrate
the diplomacy and gentleness with which consensus-building
must be approached: Girma da arziki kan sa jan sa da abawa:
"It's respect and kindness that allow one to lead a bull with
a tiny piece of thread."
Makiyayen kwad'i ya yi hankali da sandarshi! "The shepherd of
a herd of toads must be very patient with his rod!" Toads do
not move very quickly or all in the same direction, but they
also are soft-skinned and vulnerable creatures -- and if the
one responsible for herding them gets angry and starts laying
about with his staff, he is sure to crush a few.
Empiricism and causal analysis
Evidence is scarcely less important in the local cultures of
West Africa than it is in the Western scientific tradition,
though it may not always be marshaled in the same ways. In
fact, as Levi Strauss maintained in his classic La Science du
concret, "traditional" culture is, if anything, more tied to
the "hard data" of experience than is the academic one. Local
practices are typically the results of generations of
observation, trial and experiment.
These reflexes are obviously important in evaluation and are
expressed in a variety of proverbs and sayings throughout the
region. To test, among other things, policy options and the
often extravagant claims made by politicians, the Hausa people
comment quite simply, Ba a gardamar noma ga damana:. "There's
no point debating agricultural skills in the rainy [growing]
season!" In short, let each one use his or her own methods to
cultivate their field, and we will see soon enough what the
real results are.
A popular Ewe saying stresses the importance of comparing
information across contexts: "The farmer who has never
ventured beyond his field says his own methods are the best."
And another Hausa insight emphasizes the contextual
circumstances that must be understood to explain even the most
unanticipated behavior. Abin da ya ka'da kusu wuta, ya hi wuta
zahi: "Whatever caused the mouse to jump into the fire must be
hotter than fire itself."
At the same time, the relativity of all explanations of
events, and the importance of triangulating among
interpretations -- including those of the least well
represented -- are eloquently evoked in another proverb from
the African continent, this one from Zimbabwe: "The stories of
the hunt will be tales of glory until the day when the animals
have their own historians!"
Self-governance and self-assessment
Self-assessment is arguably a key component skill in genuine
self-governance, and African proverbs offer numerous related
insights. A More saying from Burkina Faso uses a striking
image to remind us that we are never independent without our
own tools and resources: "The one who sleeps on a borrowed mat
should realize he is sleeping on the cold, cold ground."
The Wolof put the same idea a little differently, but with no
less effect: Ku la abal i tank, nga dem fa ko neex: "Borrow a
man's legs and you go where he wants you to go."
But to take charge of one's destiny requires competence:
Barawon kakaki ba ya da iko ya busa shi, they say in Hausa:
"The one who steals the chief's trumpet doesn't have the
strength to blow it." And it requires an ability and
willingness to measure and correct one's faults.
Sa kogolen be dogo, in the Bambara language: "The hidden
serpent grows large." That is, the failings and weaknesses we
don't correct only get worse.
And the Hausa language adds Ranar wanka ba a b'oyon cibiya.
"On the day of the bath, there is no point in hiding the belly
button!"
A language for mobilizing local insight
The use of local proverbs in evaluation has typically served
two purposes. First, it can obviously shed new light on the
social dynamics that influence program operations, insofar as
these distillates of local culture -- many of which are quite
similar and recognizable across ethnic groups -- illustrate
factors that impinge on individual and collective behavior.
Still more important, however, the proverbs and sayings
provide a means of demonstrating that evaluation and
accountability and a host of similar notions of increasing
importance in movements for decentralization and local
development are not unfamiliar activities but simply
ramifications of concerns as old as the culture itself. And
this attitude creates the basis for helping beneficiaries
develop a culturally-appropriate technology of democratic
self-governance and -- more important still -- authoring it
themselves.
Gyorgy Szell has pointed out that a common denominator credo
in the participatory management movements of modern industry
has been the notion that "the expert in regard to a worker's
work is finally the worker him or herself." A Hausa proverb
puts it a bit differently, but with much the same import: Kome
ya ke cikin aikin d'an tsako, shaho ya dade da saninsh:.
"Whatever concerns the habits of little chicks, [you can be
quite sure that] the hawk started learning it long ago."
This material is being reposted for wider distribution by the
Africa Policy Information Center (APIC). APIC's primary
objective is to widen international policy debates around
African issues, by concentrating on providing accessible
policy-relevant information and analysis usable by a wide
range of groups and individuals.
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