Part 4: On perseverance, industry, resilience, self-confidence, self-reliance, resourcefulness, daring, fortitude, and invulnerability

Odot

The king who buries coral beads, the king who digs them up, both of then will have their names remembered by posterity.

The king who turned a forest into a sandy plain, the king who turned a sandy plain into a forest, both of their names will be remembered by posterity.

A delicious stew was procured with money.

The stew having cooled, one hollows one's palm to eat it.

It is brazenness that gives birth to wealth; it is excessive reticence that gives birth to poverty.

It is every year that the farmer receives praise.

This year the hunter kills an elephant; the next year the hunter kills a buffalo; two years hence the hunter kills a grass mouse; is his glory increasing or decreasing?

An unripe plantain is not something to eat; a useless child is not something to beat to death.

The white man's wisdom shines even across the seas; what cloth, though, is better than akẹsẹ cloth?

One makes money from goods one purchased with money.

One-who-eats-recklessly-and-dies-recklessly is the name one calls a wasteful person.

The day one learns laziness is the day one should learn how to endure a painfully empty stomach.

The day one sees the after-birth is the day it enters the earth.

It is on the day of relaxation that the lazy person experiences regret.

The day one gets to the farm is the day one fights over boundaries.

The day one learns a trade is the day one learns to be quick at it.

Ọ̀kàràkàrà is calling and blood drips from its beaks; it says even if its mouth tears to the occiput it will continue its calling.

The lazy person fails at everything, whereupon he becomes an Ifá acolyte.

The lazy person fails at everything, whereupon he goes to a Quaranic school.

Laziness, father of all diseases.

A lazy person has found no world to come to.

The lazy person cannot find a disease to contract, he bursts into tears.

The lazy person replies “yes” to all propositions.

The lazy person inherits unhappiness, he says he has inherited the fate of his lineage.

The lazy person inherits recriminations.

The lazy person curls up, and his condition becomes a serious ailment.

Laziness lends weariness a hand.

The coward knows the preventive for fighting: he says his father has ordered him not to fight on the way to the farm.

The lazy person says on the day he dies, he will be happy. Death says he will visit him (the lazy person) with suffering that is out of this world.

The coward says he will rejoice on the day he dies; but what about the woes he will experience before he dies?

A lazy person is not something one wants as a child.

The lazy person seeks out an easy task to do.

The wise will not die on a farm for the lazy; if a wise person dies on a farm for the lazy, there must be some explanation.

Each child must lift its mother's breast by itself.

The Lord will give alms, but not the type one comes upon at crossroads.

A person that will become exemplary will begin showing precociousness from childhood.

It is the child that lifts up its arms that induces people to lift it.

It is the child that lifts its arms to one that one picks up to dance with.

A child does not know where the person who carries it on her back is headed with it.

It is drunkenness that swallows (or drowns) a champion drinker.

The path does not close on a man carrying a machete.

An evil event never finds the squirrel at home.

A problem shakes one up vigorously and lets one go; a problem shakes one up vigorously as though it would never end; the trouble will end, deflating the ill-wishers and also those who will not mind their own business.

The pad placed on the head to soften the friction of the load on the head does not suffer from the weight; the person carrying the load is the one whose neck suffers under the weight.

The wind is no match for timber.

One's own hands are what one uses to mend one's fortune.

One hands are what feed one to satiation.

The hands are the agents for grooming the body.

It is on an idle hand that one rests one's chin.

It is the harmattan that will teach the person who has only a loin cloth a lesson.

65. Akẹsẹ is local yellow cotton cloth.  [Back to text]

66. The chief task of the Ifá pupil is to memorise the huge texts associated with it.  [Back to text]

67. Pupils in Koranic schools recite the koran all day, a supposedly easy task.  [Back to text]