"In the West, discussion and debate are very important, especially in the context of education. This is another area where the West differs from the indigenous world. Indigenous people would prefer to preserve in its naked form the material encountered in one's experience. Experience, to indigenous people, looks like a different kind of discourse that parallels, but does not intersect, the verbal. The more intense an experience, the more likely indigenous people are to leave it in the language in which it came rather than to discuss and dissect it with words. It is almost as if discussing diminishes what is being discussed. Villagers feel that words conquer experience, dislodging experience from its rightful place of power. So unless powerful experiences and ideas are addressed poetically, or with proverbs, people don't want to take the risk of losing in a fog of words what they have struggled so hard to acquire."
--The Healing Wisdom of Africa, Malidoma Some
