![]() So I decide to simply email an expert, Prof. Wouldn’t “African proverb” be a pretty fair description for such a thing? And given the fairly short history of European interest in Africa, isn’t it possible that a proverb might have circulated in multiple African languages for centuries before reaching English. It seemed underresearched, and ill-thought-out.Īfrican languages must have many proverbs. Still, Tolentino’s sweeping conclusion irked me. It was a sassy and superficial analysis-though that didn’t make it wrong. “That’s probably not an African proverb.” - African Proverb good rule of thumb is-if you hear a gripping “African proverb” in a TED Talk or an episode of 30 Rock, or even just from a person who is comfortable saying “African proverb” with a straight face, you might remember: ![]() She described scanning “40 pages of search results only to turn up nothing except a wide variety of white people saying ” She concluded: Tolentino dismissed the African origin story. 1 That search pointed me to a 2016 Jezebel article about this proverb and its origins, written by Jia Tolentino. This was Google’s answer even if I replaced “said,” in the question, with “coined.” Using “invented,” I got a different, less-confident answer: Al Gore. There is a whole field of study, paremiology, populated by linguists and folklorists who have dedicated their careers to the study of them.īut before I thought to consult them, I did what anyone would do, and asked Google. This kind of foggy origin is, it turns out, typical of the things we call proverbs, aphorisms, maxims, adages, and old saws. The supposed African origin means its surfaces occasionally in international development, which is where I encountered it-though not for the first time-earlier this year. It is most often cited as an “African proverb,” though it’s also attributed to Warren Buffet, Hilary Clinton, Cory Booker, Al Gore and others. So I embarked on a pointless internet odyssey: to discover the origin of the proverb: “If you want to go fast, go alone. I had reserved the month to do book promotion, and while I did plenty of that, the lack of travel and live events left a void. When the world started falling apart in April, I found myself with unexpected free time. ![]() There’s a clear English-language lineage, but there really are similar African proverbs and it’s hard to rule out cross-pollination. Who first said: if you want to go fast, go alone if you want to go far, go together? ★ ![]()
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