Publications

Bu Me Bε: Proverbs of the Akans
Authors: Peggy Appiah, Kwame Anthony Appiah and Ivor Agyeman-Duah

Product details

Price: £18.99 Place an order for this book! ISBN: 978-0-9555079-2-2 Extent: 336 pages Publication Date: 7 January 2008 Rights: World

Synopsis

Bu Me Bε: Proverbs of the Akans is the most extensive bi-lingual Twi Proverbs Dictionary published since JG Christaller’s A Collection of 3600 Twi Proverbs (1879). Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Introduction demonstrates how these proverbs can be interpreted within the tested and contested theories of meaning and literary production to show how they compare with philosophical musings from ancient Greece to England. To understand these proverbs, one needs to understand the culture from which they come. The matrilineal culture traces the familial lineage from the mother’s side hence the Akan saying that; ‘a child may resemble the father, but he has a family’ – the family being a reference to one’s mother and others within the mother’s bloodline.

This is invaluable. Our languages cannot grow as literary languages unless we also develop tools that will enable their effective use. Our languages must be in dialogue with not only the languages of Europe but also those of Africa and Asia. This dictionary is an important step in that direction.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Director, International Centre for Writing and Translation, University of California.

If language is a window to reality, then Appiah’s Bu Me Be may be justly described as an opening to an entire universe. This collection will be useful not only for linguists, but for anyone that takes Akan culture seriously, from anthropologists to historians, to cultural critics and even to modern-day product advertisers. It is a veritable treasure trove.

Ato Quayson, Director, Centre for Diaspora & Transnational Studies, University of Toronto.

An invaluable collection of some 7000 proverbs that speak to the depth and nuance of Akan and Asante life, thought, belief and social organisation.

Emmanuel Kwaku Acheampong, Professor of History and of African and African American Studies, Harvard University.

Key Selling Points

• The bi-lingual arrangement makes this dictionary unique and user-friendly to non-Akan speakers. A specialist African language text that will be of interest to academics and students on African history and language courses.
• An informed collection of over 7000 proverbs published over a century after Christaller’s book of 3600 proverbs was first published.
• Appiah’s Introduction contextualises the nuanced meaning of the proverbs to reveal the wit and wisdom of the Akan language and how it compares with other world languages.

About the Authors

Kwame Anthony Appiah is currently Professor of Philosophy at the Centre for Human Values, Princeton University and one of the leading scholars in Ethics and Philosophy. He has taught Philosophy and African American Studies in Ghana where his parents Peggy and Joe Appiah lived, and at Clare College, Cambridge University where he completed his Doctorate of Philosophy.

Peggy Appiah was awarded the MBE by Queen Elizabeth II for her distinguished promotion of Anglo-Ghanaian cultural and creative industries. She died in 2006 in Kumasi at the age of 84. Daughter of Sir Stafford Cripps, Chancellor of the Exchequer in the first post-war British Labour Government, she lived in the Asante capital for over 50 years before and after the death of her statesman husband, Joe Appiah.

Ivor Agyeman-Duah is the founder of The Centre for Intellectual Renewal in Ghana. He has been a visiting scholar at California State University and a Visiting Writer at the University of Nebraska. Among his publications are two editions of Between Faith & History: A Biography of J A Kufuor (2003, 2006). He was an advisor at the Ghana Embassy in Washington DC and is currently the Minister Counsellor for Information at the Ghana High Commission in London.