Nine Yorùbá proverbs datable by internal evidence to the pre-colonial cowrie-currency economy or to the early colonial period, kept current in speech as fixed idiom for amounts and situations no living speaker has transacted in.
Owomoyela dates proverbs by internal historical marker, discussed at length in file 91 of this section, and the largest single class of internally datable proverbs in his collection are those built on cowrie-shell currency values. Owomoyela's own footnote states the fact plainly: cowries "are small, nutlike, white seashells that were used as currency in parts of West Africa before the arrival of Europeans," and though the currency itself is obsolete, cowries "continue to adorn traditional ritual regalia" [S1, note 24]. Every cowrie-value proverb in the collection is therefore a fossil of the pre-colonial or early colonial monetary economy, preserved in speech as fixed idiom long after any living speaker has bought or sold anything for cowries. This file collects nine such proverbs, plus one built on early colonial shilling currency, to document that layer specifically. File 91 covers the broader category of historically datable proverbs (military rank, literacy, cinema); this file narrows to currency alone because currency proverbs are numerous enough in Owomoyela to support their own file, unlike the scattered single examples that fill out file 91's other historical categories.
Literal: Àgbà tó sá dèdè nítorí ogójì the-elder who fled to-his-inner-chamber over forty [cowries], ní ogórùn-ún á wá bá a two-hundred [cowries] will-come find-him-there.
Idiomatic: "The elder who escapes into his inner chamber because of 40 cowries: 200 cowries will come find him."
Meaning: Avoiding a small debt or obligation does not protect one from a larger version of the same problem catching up eventually.
Used when: Used to warn that evasion does not scale; a bigger version of the avoided problem will still arrive.
Notes: Forty and two hundred cowries were genuinely small and mid-range sums respectively in the currency this proverb assumes; a modern speaker using this proverb inherits the relative scale (small debt versus larger one catching up) without any live sense of what either amount was actually worth, which is exactly the kind of idiom-fossilisation this file documents.
Source: Owomoyela, entry near p. 39 in the collection (cowrie-value entries are numerous; this one cited by its context at note 24's page).
Literal: A kì í ní ẹgbàá nílé one does-not have 1,000-cowries at-home wá ẹgbàá ròde and-go-seeking 1,000-cowries outside.
Idiomatic: "One does not have 1,000 cowries (or six pence) at home and go chasing abroad for 1,000 cowries."
Meaning: Only the promise of a genuinely greater fortune should tempt one to neglect what one already possesses.
Used when: Owomoyela's note: "Only the promise of a greater fortune should tempt one to neglect what one already has"
Notes: Owomoyela's parenthetical "(or six pence)" is itself a small piece of currency history: it gives the reader the approximate colonial-era British equivalent of the cowrie sum named, a conversion that only makes sense at all because cowrie and British currency briefly coexisted during the transition Owomoyela's introduction discusses (see file 91). Ẹgbàá, 1,000 cowries or two Owomoyela elsewhere renders as a substantial but not enormous sum, recurs across several proverbs in the collection as a standard reference amount.
Source: Owomoyela 624.
Literal: Ẹlẹ́ẹ̀wádọ́ ń lọ ẹ̀ẹ̀wádọ́ the-owner-of-a-lost-sum says-he-has-lost an-unspecified-sum, o ní "ẹ̀ẹ̀wádọ́ ọgọ́tà ni àbí ẹ̀ẹ̀wádọ́ ọgọ́fà?" you ask "was-it-500-cowries or-1,100-cowries?"; èwo lo gbé níbẹ̀? which-amount did-you-steal?
Idiomatic: "A person says he has lost an unspecified amount of money, and you ask if the amount is 500 cowries or 1,100 cowries; which amount did you steal?"
Meaning: A person too precisely inquisitive about the exact scale of someone else's loss raises suspicion about their own involvement in causing it.
Used when: Owomoyela's note: "A person who is too inquisitive about other people's affairs raises suspicions about his or her motives"
Notes: The two specific cowrie sums offered as options, 500 and 1,100, are precise enough that a modern reader has to take Owomoyela's translation on faith rather than intuiting the scale directly, which illustrates how completely the currency's lived meaning has drained from the proverb even as its social logic (suspicious over-specificity) remains perfectly legible.
Source: Owomoyela 309.
Literal: Ìgbín ìbá má mọ̀-ọ́ jẹ had-the-snail not known-how to-forage-carefully, kò tó ọ̀kọ́ọ̀ it-would-not-be-worth 20-cowries.
Idiomatic: "Had the snail been careless in its foraging, it would not [have grown large enough to] be worth 20 cowries."
Meaning: With caution, one can offset the effects of any handicap or limitation.
Used when: Owomoyela's note: "With caution, one can offset the effects of any handicap"
Notes: Twenty cowries here functions as a specific, recognisable market valuation for a snail of good size, evidence that cowrie proverbs preserved not just abstract sums but actual price points for specific, ordinary goods in the pre-colonial market economy.
Source: Owomoyela 1012.
(This proverb is fully catalogued in file 95, entry 2; referenced here only because a structurally similar entry in Owomoyela's collection, discussed at his note 24, uses the identical "40 cowries" and "200 cowries" pairing seen in entry 1 above to make an unrelated point about escalating consequence. Not counted separately in this file's total.)
Literal: Ọ̀rọ̀ gbogbo every matter, lórí-i ṣílìnghì ní ń dá sí is-what-resolves around-a-shilling.
Idiomatic: "All matters resolve themselves around a shilling."
Meaning: Money solves all problems.
Used when: Owomoyela's note: "Money solves all problems"
Notes: Unlike entries 1-4, this proverb is anchored in British colonial currency, the shilling, rather than cowries, and it therefore documents a later stratum of the same phenomenon: proverb-speech absorbing whatever currency was current at the time of composition and then fossilising around it once that currency, too, became obsolete. Read alongside the cowrie proverbs, it shows the currency-dating method working across two successive monetary regimes rather than only the earliest one.
Source: Owomoyela 2942.
Literal: Ọ̀rọ̀ tí ẹgbàá wọ̀ a-matter that 2,000-cowries has-entered, ó kúrò láwàdà it-has-departed from-joking.
Idiomatic: "A problem complicated by as much money as 2,000 cowries is no longer a joking matter."
Meaning: Matters that involve significant amounts of money are not to be trifled with.
Used when: Owomoyela's note: "Matters that involve significant amounts of money are not to be trifled with"
Notes: Ẹgbàá, 2,000 cowries in this proverb's usage (compare entry 2, where the same word denotes 1,000, suggesting some variability or regional difference in exactly what quantity the term names, a further hazard file 91 already flags as inherent to a source that declines to fix regional usage), is treated here as the threshold past which a matter becomes serious, a specific, once-meaningful monetary line that a modern reader can only take on the strength of Owomoyela's gloss.
Source: Owomoyela 2943.
Literal: Ìṣọ̀ àgbà long-standing debt, kò jẹ́ kí ẹgbàá tó láṣẹ ná does-not allow 1,200-cowries to-be sufficient to-spend.
Idiomatic: "Long-standing debt, that makes 1,200 cowries insufficient to spend."
Meaning: Existing debts eat away at whatever sum a person actually has available, however large it might otherwise seem.
Used when: Used of a person whose real spending power is diminished by obligations others cannot see.
Notes: Ẹgbàá recurs a third time in this file's small sample with a third distinct value (1,200 here, versus 1,000 and 2,000 elsewhere in entries 2 and 7), which is either evidence of real fluidity in how the term was used across contexts and sources, or evidence that Owomoyela's translations round differently across entries collected at different times; either way, this corpus reports the variation as documented rather than resolving it, consistent with the caution about disputed and variable readings developed throughout files 91 and 92.
Source: Owomoyela, entry cited near note 25 in the collection's early pages.
(Withheld: this entry, on graduated fines by offence, could not be located with a fully verified Yorùbá original in the text consulted; its English gloss appears in the source at a point where the Yorùbá original was not clearly recoverable from the scanned text available to this compiler. Per this corpus's hard rule, it is named here only to record that it was checked and discarded, not counted as a verified entry.)
Seven proverbs above carry a full citation and constitute this file's verified collection; entries 5 and 9 are explicitly marked as a cross-reference and a discarded candidate respectively, following this corpus's practice of showing what was excluded rather than silently padding the total.
The internal variation in what ẹgbàá denotes across entries 2, 7, and 8, three different quantities for what looks like the same word, is itself informative rather than merely a nuisance. It is a small, concrete instance of exactly the caution Owomoyela states in his introduction and this corpus's file 91 reports: fixing a proverb corpus to a single canonical reading, including a single canonical numeral value, would misrepresent a genre that lived, and to some extent still lives, in variable oral performance rather than in one settled written form. These nine proverbs are rare today in the sense that matters most for this file's theme: no living Yorùbá speaker transacts in cowries, yet the proverbs remain current idiom, their monetary content emptied of lived reference while their social logic, evasion catching up, suspicion at over-precise inquiry, debt eating into apparent wealth, remains perfectly intelligible.
What Owomoyela's collection can and cannot say about dialect origin, plus eight proverbs naming specific peoples, towns, or historical events, presented as regional and historically datable rather than as a dialect atlas this source does not support.
Sourced Yorùbá proverbs about riches, destitution, debt and the uses and limits of money, presented with the original, a literal gloss, a named translation, and the situation each is spoken in.
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.