Fourteen Yorùbá proverbs built on funfun (white), dúdú (black) and pupa (red or light brown), showing colour used as a marker of purity, seniority, concealment, and reliable natural pattern rather than as simple visual description.
Yorùbá proverb-speech uses three basic colour terms with unusual frequency and range: funfun (white), dúdú (black), and pupa (red, or the lighter brown-red shade Owomoyela sometimes renders "light brown"). None of the fourteen proverbs collected here uses colour as neutral visual description; in every case the colour term carries a social or moral claim, purity or concealment for white, seniority or evil for black, junior status or a specific unattractive shade for the lighter tone. Reading the set together shows colour functioning as a compact evaluative vocabulary rather than as observation.
Literal: Adìẹ funfun the-white chicken ò mọ̀ ara rẹ̀ lágbà does-not know itself as-an-elder.
Idiomatic: "The white chicken does not recognize itself as an elder."
Meaning: A person of standing who forgets their own dignity and acts beneath their station.
Used when: Owomoyela's note: "One should act one's age always"
Notes: White plumage here is not itself the point; it likely marks the bird as visually distinct or notable within a flock, and the proverb's force is entirely about self-forgetting rather than about the colour's own meaning, a caution against reading every colour proverb in this file as symbolically loaded.
Source: Owomoyela 86.
Literal: Àgbà kì í fàárọ̀ an-elder does-not in-the-early-morning họ ìdí scratch the-buttocks kó má kan funfun without touching something-white.
Idiomatic: "A grown person does not scratch his buttocks in the early morning without showing some whiteness."
Meaning: Improper behaviour, however privately performed, tends to leave visible evidence.
Used when: Owomoyela's note: "Improper behavior brings disgrace"
Notes: Here white functions as a literal, practical marker, ash or chalky residue from an unwashed body, that betrays an act meant to be concealed; the colour's meaning is diagnostic rather than symbolic, evidence that not every colour-word in these proverbs is doing moral or aesthetic work.
Source: Owomoyela 107.
Literal: Lékèélékèé cattle-egrets ò yé ẹyin dúdú do-not lay black eggs; funfun ni wọ́n ń yé ẹyin wọn white is-what they lay their-eggs.
Idiomatic: "Cattle egrets never lay black eggs; only white eggs do they lay."
Meaning: Only certain kinds of behaviour or output are appropriate to a person's given position or nature.
Used when: Owomoyela's note: "Only certain types of behavior are suitable for people in certain positions"
Notes: The egret's own whiteness (compare entry 6 below, where its plumage is again the standard against which another bird is measured) is assumed as background knowledge; the proverb generalises from an observed natural constancy, a bird's egg colour always matching its own kind, to a claim about the fixed appropriateness of conduct to station.
Source: Owomoyela 429.
Literal: Aṣọ funfun white cloth òun àbàwọ́n and stain kì í rẹ́ are-not friends.
Idiomatic: "White cloth and stains are not friends."
Meaning: A person of good breeding does not keep company with an ill-bred person; purity and its opposite are naturally incompatible.
Used when: Owomoyela's note: "A person of good breeding does not associate with an ill-bred person"
Notes: White cloth's vulnerability to visible staining is used here as the standard of comparison for reputation's vulnerability to bad association, a use of white as purity-marker consistent with its role in ritual contexts (compare file 71, entry 17, on white cloth as ọ̀rẹ́ òrìṣà, friend of the gods).
Source: Owomoyela 795.
Literal: Ẹni tó fi irun dúdú ṣeré whoever with black hair plays-around, yó fi funfun sin ẹni ẹlẹ́mìí will with white-hair serve another-living-person.
Idiomatic: "Whoever plays around with his or her black hair will serve others with his or her white hair."
Meaning: Wasting one's youth (marked by black hair) leads to a struggling old age (marked by white hair) spent labouring for others.
Used when: Owomoyela's note: "If one wastes one's youth, one spends one's old age struggling for a living"
Notes: Black and white hair function here as a life-stage timeline compressed into two colour terms, youth and age respectively, a use distinct from every other entry in this file and closer to a natural clock than to a moral or purity marker.
Source: Owomoyela 965.
Literal: Bí iṣu ẹni bá funfun if one's-yam is white, à fọwọ́ bò ó jẹ one covers-it-with-the-hand to eat-it.
Idiomatic: "If one's yam is white, one eats it furtively."
Meaning: It would be unwise to flaunt good fortune; the whiter, more desirable yam is eaten discreetly rather than displayed.
Used when: Owomoyela's note: "It would be unwise to flaunt good fortune"
Notes: White here marks a specifically valued, superior grade of yam, so whiteness signals quality and desirability, and the proverb's caution is precisely that displaying this positively marked colour invites envy, one of the clearest cases in the set of a colour term carrying a value judgement rather than mere description.
Source: Owomoyela 1432.
Literal: Fi ẹ̀jẹ̀ sínú keep blood inside, tu itọ́ funfun jáde spit clear-white saliva outward.
Idiomatic: "Keep your red blood inside and spit out clear saliva."
Meaning: Never show your hand to an enemy, or let your words or actions reveal your true intentions or feelings.
Used when: Owomoyela's note flags this as sometimes used as a specific criticism , of concealed hostility presented as calm indifference.
Notes: Red (blood, the true, hidden feeling) is set directly against white (saliva, the calm, visible surface) as a pair of opposed colour-coded states, inner truth against outer presentation. A near-inverse proverb appears elsewhere in the collection, entry 8 below, which uses the identical colour pair to condemn the reverse deception.
Source: Owomoyela 1553, with note 43.
Literal: A kì í fi ẹ̀jẹ̀ dúdú sínú one does-not keep dark-blood inside tu ìtọ́ funfun jáde and-spit white-saliva outward.
Idiomatic: "One does not leave red blood inside and spit out white saliva."
Meaning: One should never allow people to believe one loves them while secretly wishing them ill.
Used when: Owomoyela's note: "Never let people think you love them when in fact you wish them ill"
Notes: This is not simply a repeat of entry 7; Owomoyela glosses the two in opposite moral registers, entry 7 as strategic self-protection against an enemy, this entry as a condemnation of hidden malice toward someone who trusts you. The identical red-inside/white-outside colour image is thus made to carry two different, even opposed, ethical readings depending on who is being deceived and why, a strong instance of this corpus's recurring point that a proverb's meaning depends on its occasion of use, not on its image alone.
Source: Owomoyela 2888.
Literal: Ọ̀gẹ̀dẹ̀ dúdú black/unripe plantain ò ṣéé bùṣán is-not fit-to-be-cooked-and-eaten; ọmọ burúkú a-bad child ò ṣéé lù pa is-not fit-to-be-beaten to-death.
Idiomatic: "An unripe plantain is not something to eat; a useless child is not something to beat to death."
Meaning: Certain problems, however unsatisfactory, simply have to be lived with rather than eliminated.
Used when: Owomoyela's note: "Certain problems one simply has to live with"
Notes: Here dúdú marks unripeness rather than any moral or social quality, the plantain's colour before it turns yellow with ripening, a further instance of a colour term used for a practical, non-symbolic property, and it is paired with a human case (the bad child) only by structural analogy, not because black itself carries any of the child's badness.
Source: Owomoyela 2335.
Literal: Ọ̀yá ń fẹ́ the-harmattan-wind blows o ò funfun you do-not turn-white, ìrì ń sẹ̀ the-dew falls o ò jẹ̀lẹ́ you do-not soften; oníṣègùn ni yó fi owó ẹ̀ pọ́ orí mu the-medicine-man is-who will use your-money buy palm-oil-for-his-head [feast at your expense].
Idiomatic: "The harmattan rages, and your skin does not go white; the drizzle falls, and your skin does not soften; your money will end up paying for the medicine man's meal."
Meaning: A person whose skin fails to respond to weather the way others' does is marked as unusual, and that difference will end up enriching whatever healer is consulted about it.
Used when: Owomoyela's note: "A person affected by natural phenomena in a way different from others will enrich doctors"
Notes: The expected whitening of skin under the dry harmattan wind is treated here as the normal, unremarkable case, and its absence is what marks a person as anomalous; this is the one entry in the set where a colour change (or its failure to occur) is itself the diagnostic sign around which the whole proverb turns.
Source: Owomoyela 3957.
Literal: Inú ìkòkò dúdú from-inside the-black pot lẹ̀kọ funfún ti ń jáde is-where the-white corn-meal comes-out.
Idiomatic: "It is from the black pot that the white corn meal comes."
Meaning: An evil or unattractive-seeming person can produce or raise a good one; outward appearance does not predict inner quality or outcome.
Used when: Owomoyela's note: "An evil person may sire a good person" , with a cross-reference to a related entry (4097) making the wider point that character cannot be judged by appearance alone.
Notes: This proverb sets black and white in direct container-and-contents opposition, the sooty, blackened cooking pot producing pale corn meal, and reads that everyday kitchen fact as a general argument against judging outcomes by their source's appearance; it is one of the clearest cases in the set where black is explicitly coded negative (evil) and white explicitly coded positive (good) within a single proverb.
Source: Owomoyela 4082; compare 4097.
Literal: Dúdú lágbà black is-the-elder, pupa làbúrò light-brown/red is-the-younger-sibling.
Idiomatic: "Black is the elder; light brown is the younger."
Meaning: A dark complexion is more desirable, and carries more standing, than a light one.
Used when: Owomoyela's note states the claim directly: "A dark complexion is more desirable than a light one"
Notes: This proverb states a colour-based valuation without any narrative vehicle, animal or object image, more directly than any other entry in this file: dark skin is explicitly ranked senior and preferable to lighter skin. It stands as documented evidence of one recorded Yorùbá aesthetic and social judgement about skin tone; readers should note that proverb collections record such judgements as attested speech, not as this corpus's endorsement, and that other proverbs and cultural evidence outside this narrow sample may complicate or contradict a single saying's claim to represent settled consensus.
Source: Owomoyela 4182.
Literal: Funfun lẹyẹ ń ṣu white is-what-a-bird excretes, kì í ṣu dúdú it-does-not excrete black.
Idiomatic: "White is the color of bird's droppings, never black."
Meaning: Certain things reliably happen in certain fixed, predictable ways.
Used when: Owomoyela's note: "Certain things one can rely on to happen in certain set ways"
Notes: This is the plainest case in the set of colour used purely as a marker of dependable natural pattern, with no social or moral freight attached at all; it functions as this file's control case, showing that not every colour proverb in Yorùbá carries the symbolic weight entries 4, 8, 11, and 12 clearly do.
Source: Owomoyela 4990.
Literal: Funfun ni iyì eyín whiteness is the-glory of-teeth; ó gún régé ni iyì ọrùn being-straight is the-glory of-the-neck; ọmú ṣìkí-ṣìkí ni iyì obìnrin firm-pointed breasts are the-glory of-a-woman.
Idiomatic: "Whiteness is the pride of the teeth; straightness is the pride of the neck; firm, pointed breasts are the pride of a woman."
Meaning: Each part or person has its own proper standard of excellence.
Used when: Owomoyela's note: "There is a proper and ideal form for everything," with a cross-reference to entry 2723, elsewhere in his collection, which makes the identical claim about teeth's whiteness in relation to a smile (reproduced in owe-iwa-character, entry 2) .
Notes: White teeth recur across this corpus as the standard exemplar of a body part's proper excellence; see owe-iwa-character entry 2 for the fuller pairing of white teeth with good character as the two things that make a smile and a person, respectively, worth looking at. Here the same white-teeth image is folded into a longer catalogue of physical ideals rather than serving the character-metaphor it carries in that other entry.
Source: Owomoyela 4991; compare 2723.
Colour in these fourteen proverbs does at least four distinct kinds of work, and this file resists treating them as one uniform symbolic code. White marks purity or high value (entries 4, 6, 14) but also, in a purely practical register, marks visible evidence of a concealed act (entry 2) or a normal, expected bodily response (entry 10). Black marks seniority and depth in the single most explicit case (entry 12), but elsewhere marks unripeness (entry 9) or an evil disposition contrasted against a good outcome (entry 11) with no consistency forcing black toward either a uniformly positive or uniformly negative reading across the whole set. Red or light brown appears only twice (entries 7 and 12) and in each case is set in direct opposition to another colour rather than carrying an independent meaning of its own. The lesson of the set taken together is that Yorùbá proverb-speech does not run on a single fixed colour symbolism; each proverb establishes its own local colour logic, and a reader should not import one proverb's colour-value onto another's without checking.
Seven Yorùbá proverbs whose entire mechanism depends on tone distinguishing otherwise identical syllables, with Owomoyela's own footnotes explaining each pun and what an untoned or translated rendering necessarily loses.
Fifty-eight Yorùbá proverbs on character, presented with the original, a literal gloss, a named translation, and the situation each is spoken in.
Forty-eight Yorùbá proverbs on the ọmọlúàbí ideal, presented with the original, a literal gloss, a named translation, and the situation each is spoken in.
Sourced Yorùbá proverbs about telling the truth, the mechanics of lying and self-deception, and the value placed on a person whose word is reliable.
Forty-three Yorùbá proverbs on sùúrù, patience, presented with the original, a literal gloss, a named translation, and the situation each is spoken in.
Fifty-five Yorùbá proverbs on pride, arrogance, humility, and the limits of what a person can know about themselves, each given with the original, a literal gloss, and a named translation.