Every proverb, name and story here belongs to a people and a language. These are the 34 documented so far. Pick one to read about it and what has been collected.
Uganda · 3 proverbs, 4 names
The Acholi are a Luo-speaking, Western Nilotic people whose ancestors migrated from southern Sudan into what is now northern Uganda between the 15th and 19th centuries.
Ghana · 5 proverbs, 30 names
The Akan are a cluster of related peoples (including the Ashanti, Fante, and others) numbering around 25 million across Ghana and Ivory Coast, speaking Tano languages of the Niger-Congo family.
Morocco · 3 proverbs, 4 names
The Amazigh (Berber) peoples are indigenous to North Africa, with a presence stretching back at least 5,000 years across a region from Morocco to Egypt’s Siwa Oasis.
Ethiopia · 3 proverbs, 23 names
The Amhara are one of Ethiopia’s two largest ethnic groups, tracing their language and much of their heritage to Semitic-speaking migrants who settled the Ethiopian highlands roughly 3,000 years ago.
Mali · 3 proverbs, 3 names
The Bambara are Mali’s largest ethnic group, numbering more than 6 million and speaking a Mande language that has become the country’s principal lingua franca.
Zambia · 3 proverbs, 4 names
The Bemba are Zambia’s largest ethnic group, roughly a fifth of the population, concentrated in the country’s Northern, Luapula, and Copperbelt provinces.
Burundi · 1 proverb
Burundi’s people speak Kirundi, a Bantu language shared across the country’s traditional social categories of Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa.
Malawi · 3 proverbs, 4 names
The Chewa are the largest of Malawi’s Maravi peoples, whose ancestors migrated from the Katanga region of what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo in the 15th and 16th centuries.
Ghana · 2 proverbs, 11 names
The Ewe speak a Gbe language and live mainly in Ghana’s Volta Region, Togo, and Benin, tracing their history through a series of migrations that passed through the town of Notsie in what is now Togo.
Benin · 4 proverbs, 2 names
The Fon are the largest ethnic group in southern Benin, numbering around 3.5 million and speaking a Gbe language.
Guinea, Nigeria · 3 proverbs, 3 names
The Fulani (Fulɓe) are one of Africa’s most widely dispersed peoples, numbering more than 25 million across the Sahel from Senegal to Sudan, with roots tracing back to the Futa Toro region of the Senegal River valley.
Ghana · 3 proverbs, 22 names
The Ga people founded Accra, now Ghana’s capital, arriving in the region in the 16th century according to oral tradition and organizing themselves into six independent coastal towns.
Nigeria · 4 proverbs, 18 names
The Hausa are one of West Africa’s largest ethnic groups, with tens of millions of speakers across northern Nigeria and southern Niger.
Nigeria · 5 proverbs, 22 names
The Igbo live primarily in southeastern Nigeria and are traditionally organized as a large number of autonomous, village-based communities rather than a single centralized kingdom.
Kenya · 4 proverbs, 12 names
The Kikuyu are Kenya’s largest ethnic group, settled in the highlands around Mount Kenya (which they call Kirinyaga) since roughly the 17th to 19th centuries.
Zambia · 3 proverbs, 4 names
The Lozi, formerly known as the Aluyi, founded a kingdom in western Zambia’s Barotse floodplain in the 17th century, ruled by a king known as the Litunga, ‘holder of the earth.’ The kingdom, known as Barotseland, became a British protectorate in 1890 and later joined Zambia at independence in 1964.
Kenya · 3 proverbs, 4 names
The Luhya are Kenya’s second-largest ethnic group, an umbrella of more than twenty related Bantu-speaking communities in western Kenya whose ancestors migrated from Uganda beginning in the 15th century.
Kenya · 4 proverbs, 3 names
The Luo are Kenya’s fourth-largest ethnic group, settled mainly along the eastern shore of Lake Victoria after a centuries-long migration from what is now South Sudan.
Kenya · 3 proverbs, 15 names
The Maasai are a Nilotic people of northern, central, and southern Kenya and northern Tanzania, whose ancestors migrated south from what is now South Sudan around the 15th century.
Madagascar · 3 proverbs, 4 names
Madagascar’s first settlers arrived by sea from Southeast Asia roughly 1,000 to 2,000 years ago, and the Malagasy language is Austronesian: its closest relatives are spoken on the island of Borneo, not on the African mainland.
Democratic Republic of Congo, DR Congo · 3 proverbs, 4 names
The Nande, also called Yira, are a Bantu people of eastern DR Congo’s North Kivu province, where they make up more than 60% of the population of the Beni and Lubero territories.
Zimbabwe · 4 proverbs, 4 names
The Ndebele of Zimbabwe descend from a Zulu regiment led by Mzilikazi, who broke away from Shaka’s kingdom in 1822 and migrated north, eventually settling in what is now Matabeleland by 1838.
Ethiopia · 3 proverbs, 18 names
The Oromo are Ethiopia’s largest ethnic group, making up more than a third of the country’s population and speaking a Cushitic language with tens of millions of speakers.
Central African Republic · 3 proverbs
The Sango are a riverine people of the Central African Republic and northern DR Congo, historically settled along the Ubangi River as skilled canoemen and fishermen.
Lesotho · 3 proverbs, 4 names
The Basotho nation was forged in the early 19th century when King Moshoeshoe I gathered scattered Sotho-speaking clans, displaced by the upheavals of the Mfecane, into a single kingdom based at the mountain stronghold of Thaba Bosiu.
Zimbabwe · 4 proverbs, 4 names
The Shona make up roughly 80% of Zimbabwe’s population and speak a Bantu language with several major dialects.
Somalia · 4 proverbs, 17 names
The Somali are one of Africa’s most linguistically homogeneous peoples: nearly all Somalis, across Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Djibouti, speak a single Cushitic language.
Tanzania · 6 proverbs, 22 names
The Swahili are a coastal East African people whose culture and language emerged from centuries of trade and intermarriage between Bantu-speaking Africans and Arab and Persian merchants across the Indian Ocean.
Eritrea · 3 proverbs, 9 names
The Tigrinya-speaking Tigray people of highland Eritrea and northern Ethiopia trace their heritage to the ancient Kingdom of Aksum, one of the ancient world’s major powers, which adopted Christianity as its state religion in the 4th century AD.
Botswana · 3 proverbs, 4 names
The Tswana, or Batswana, make up about 85% of Botswana’s population and speak Setswana, a language closely related to Sesotho.
Senegal · 6 proverbs, 6 names
The Wolof make up around 40% of Senegal’s population, though their language is spoken far more widely, serving as the country’s common tongue across ethnic lines.
South Africa · 4 proverbs, 11 names
The Xhosa are a southern Nguni people who settled South Africa’s Eastern Cape region by around the 14th or 15th century, expanding under the royal line founded by the chief Tshawe.
Nigeria · 6 proverbs, 33 names
The Yoruba, numbering more than 50 million worldwide, are centered in southwestern Nigeria and neighboring Benin and Togo.
South Africa · 7 proverbs, 21 names
The Zulu are South Africa’s largest ethnic group, concentrated in KwaZulu-Natal, and isiZulu is the country’s most widely spoken home language.