Alago Proverbs as Effective Indigenous Discourse Tool for Conflict Management

Abstract

Proverbs are ready to use, impersonal linguistic tools for interpersonal and social interaction. Alago Proverbs are rhetoric arsenals in a compact and condensed form employed by the Alago people in everyday conversation to advise, warn, criticize, incite, strategize, sue for peace, recount experiences amongst other things. On the other hand, a critical look at paremiological and paremiographical efforts in Nigeria reveals a neglect of proverbs from minority cultures like the Alago. The paper therefore examines the contextual performance of Alago proverb as rhetoric and as an indigenous discourse tool for conflict management and resolution in the society. The data for the paper was collected through participant -observation method which involved recoding, documenting and translating the recoded context to English. It adopts an eclectic approach for analysis; a combination of Mey’s Pragmatic Act theory and Functionalist theory. The findings reveal that proverb meaning among the Alago is largely dependent on context and participants as one proverb can have different meanings depending on the context and participants, thus a proverb without a context is “like sesame seed lying in wait for the early rain to sprout”. The paper therefore concludes that Alago proverbs are situation bound utterances, useful in conflict resolution, crisis management and in fostering harmonious co-existence.