Ɔberebere ɔbɛhunu
Ɔberebere ɔbɛhunu The one who asks around will find it The one who asks questions doesn’t lose his way.
There is a crossroads somewhere in the Ashanti region — red laterite, two paths disappearing into forest, no sign — and a traveller has stopped. Not because they are lost. Because they are about to ask. In Akan culture the person who asks is not admitting weakness. They are performing a specific kind of intelligence: the intelligence of knowing that you do not know, and that the road is more likely to answer if you address it through the people who have walked it before.
The proverb does not say that asking is brave. It says that asking works. The one who asks questions does not lose their way. The claim is practical, not moral — though the practical and the moral, in Akan proverbial thought, are difficult to separate.
What it means
The proverb operates on two levels. On the surface, it is navigational advice: if you are travelling and do not know the road, ask someone. You will arrive. This is literal wisdom in a landscape where roads fork without markers and local knowledge is the only reliable map.
On the deeper level, the proverb is about the relationship between knowledge and humility. The person who refuses to ask — out of pride, embarrassment, or the assumption that they already know enough — is the person who will lose the road. The person who asks, who admits ignorance in exchange for direction, will find it. The proverb makes ignorance conditional: you are only truly lost if you are too proud to say you are lost.
In Akan thought, proverbs (ɛbɛ or mmebusem) are not decorative quotations but functional instruments of reasoning. They carry the weight of collective experience and are used in deliberation, conflict resolution, and instruction. This particular proverb is addressed most often to the young — to children being taught that there is no shame in asking an elder for guidance — but it applies equally to anyone who has confused knowing-the-way with being-on-the-way.
Where it comes from
The proverb belongs to the vast body of Akan mmebusem — the proverbial literature of the Akan peoples of Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, one of the richest proverb traditions in Africa. The Basel missionary J. G. Christaller compiled 3,600 Twi proverbs in his 1879 collection, Twi Mmebusem, a work that remains a primary reference. More recently, Peggy Appiah, Kwame Anthony Appiah, and Ivor Agyeman-Duah published Bu Me Bɛ: Proverbs of the Akans (2007), a scholarly collection with Twi originals and English translations that brought Akan proverbial wisdom to a wider academic audience.
The “asking” proverb circulates well beyond Akan-speaking communities. Variants appear across West Africa — in Yoruba, Wolof, Igbo, and Hausa traditions — and the saying has entered the global circulation of “African proverbs” through anthologies and quote collections. The Akan form has the strongest documented attestation and is the most reliably sourced anchor for the family.
The proverb’s prominence in Akan culture is inseparable from the broader Akan emphasis on wisdom as a communal resource. Akan thought does not locate wisdom primarily in the individual. It locates it in the community — in the accumulated experience of elders, in the proverbial tradition that encodes that experience, in the practice of consultation and deliberation that makes communal knowledge available to individuals. To ask a question, in this framework, is not to confess a personal deficiency. It is to participate in a system that works only when people are willing to use it.
How it gets used today
In modern Ghana the proverb is still everyday speech — used in Twi, Fante, and English with equal fluency. A Kumasi grandmother sending a grandchild on an errand to an unfamiliar part of town will say it and mean: ask, don’t wander. A Accra professional starting a new job and hesitating to ask colleagues for help will hear it from a friend and understand: your silence is more expensive than your embarrassment. The proverb also appears in Ghanaian educational contexts — in schools and mentoring programmes — where it reinforces the cultural value of seeking guidance rather than bluffing through uncertainty. There is no stigma attached to the asking. The stigma attaches to the not-asking, to the person who walked past the crossroads in silence and ended up in the bush.
Cousins from other tongues
The counsel to ask rather than pretend appears in traditions separated by thousands of miles, and what changes between them is not the advice but the cost structure — what asking costs the asker, and what staying silent costs them.
The Japanese cousin, 聞くは一時の恥、聞かぬは一生の恥 (kiku wa ittoki no haji, kikanu wa isshō no haji) — “asking is a moment’s shame; not asking is a lifetime’s shame” — makes explicit what the Akan proverb leaves implicit: that asking has a price, and the price is 恥 (haji), shame. The Japanese proverb does not deny that asking is embarrassing. It acknowledges the embarrassment and then performs a calculation: one moment of shame now, or a whole life of shame later. The proverb is an argument from efficiency. It says: yes, it will cost you something to ask; but it will cost you much more not to.
The Akan proverb makes no such calculation. It does not mention shame at all. In the Akan formulation, asking is not an embarrassment to be weighed against a worse embarrassment. It is simply what intelligent people do when they do not know the road. The absence of shame from the Akan version is not an oversight — it reflects a worldview in which seeking communal knowledge is a normal, unmarked act, not a concession. The Japanese proverb must overcome the barrier of shame to reach the same conclusion; the Akan proverb does not recognise the barrier.
The Hebrew cousin comes from a different altitude entirely. In Pirkei Avot 4:1 — the Ethics of the Fathers, a tractate of the Mishnah — Ben Zoma asks: “Who is wise? One who learns from every person.” The Hebrew does not talk about roads or getting lost. It talks about identity. The wise person is not someone who knows things but someone who learns from everyone — from the scholar, the fool, the child, the stranger. The act of learning from others is not a strategy for navigating a particular situation. It is a definition of what wisdom is. Where the Akan proverb says ask, and you will find the way, and the Japanese says ask, and you will avoid the greater shame, the Hebrew says ask, and you will become wise — not because of what you learn but because of the disposition the asking reveals.
Three formulations, three attitudes toward the same act. The Akan treats asking as natural. The Japanese treats it as costly but worth the cost. The Hebrew treats it as constitutive — the asking itself is what makes you wise, regardless of the answer.
A small closing
What the proverb does not say is as important as what it does. It does not say that asking is courageous. It does not say that asking is humble. It says that asking works — that the road opens for the person who addresses it honestly. The proverb’s faith is not in the asker’s character but in the road’s willingness to be found.