Africa Quotes

“My African roots made me what I am today. They’re the reason I’m from the Dominican Republic. They’re the reason I exist at all. To these roots I owe everything.”
― Junot Díaz

“America is a young dumb country and it needs all kinds of help. America is a dumb puppy with big teeth that bite and hurt. And we take care of America. We hold America to our bosom; we feed America, we make love to America. There wouldn't be an America if it wasn't for black people. So you have some dedicated black Americans who will die a million deaths to save America. And this is home for us. We don't know really about Africa. We talk it in a romantic sense, but America is it. And so, America is always going to be okay as long as black people don't totally lose their mind, cause we'll pick up the pieces and turn it into a new dance.”
― Abiodun Oyewole

“One avoids Creolisms. Some families completely forbid Creole and mothers ridicule their children for speaking it.”
― Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

“My horizon lightened, I see an old woman. Who is she? Where is she from? Bent over, the ends of her boubou tied behind her, she empties into a plastic bag the left-overs of red rice. Her smiling face tells of the pleasant day she has just had. She wants to take back proof of this to her family, living perhaps in Ouakam, Thiaroye or Pikine.

Standing upright, her eyes meeting my disapproving look, she mutters between teeth reddened by cola nuts: 'Lady, death is just as beautiful as life has been.”
― Mariama Bâ, So Long a Letter

“You either get the point of Africa or you don't. What draws me back year after year is that it's like seeing the world with the lid off.”
― AA Gill

“(On WWI:)

A man of importance had been shot at a place I could not pronounce in Swahili or in English, and, because of this shooting, whole countries were at war. It seemed a laborious method of retribution, but that was the way it was being done. ...

A messenger came to the farm with a story to tell. It was not a story that meant much as stories went in those days. It was about how the war progressed in German East Africa and about a tall young man who was killed in it. ... It was an ordinary story, but Kibii and I, who knew him well, thought there was no story like it, or one as sad, and we think so now.

The young man tied his shuka on his shoulder one day and took his shield and his spear and went to war. He thought war was made of spears and shields and courage, and he brought them all.

But they gave him a gun, so he left the spear and the shield behind him and took the courage, and went where they sent him because they said this was his duty and he believed in duty. ...

He took the gun and held it the way they had told him to hold it, and walked where they told him to walk, smiling a little and looking for another man to fight.

He was shot and killed by the other man, who also believed in duty, and he was buried where he fell. It was so simple and so unimportant.

But of course it meant something to Kibii and me, because the tall young man was Kibii's father and my most special friend. Arab Maina died on the field of action in the service of the King. But some said it was because he had forsaken his spear.”
― Beryl Markham, West with the Night

“Wilderness gave us knowledge. Wilderness made us human. We came from here. Perhaps that is why so many of us feel a strong bond to this land called Serengeti; it is the land of our youth.”
― Boyd Norton, Serengeti: The Eternal Beginning

“Superorganism. A biologist coined that word for our great African ant colonies, claiming that consciousness and intelligence resided not in the individual ant but in the collective ant mind. The trail of red taillights stretching to the horizon as day broke around us made me think of that term. Order and purpose must reside somewhere other than within each vehicle. That morning I heard the hum, the respiration of the superorganism. It's a sound the new immigrant hears but not for long. By the time I learned to say "6-inch Number 7 on rye with Swiss hold the lettuce," the sound, too, was gone. It became part of the what the mind would label silence. You were subsumed into the superorganism.”
― Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone

“Have you a room that you could let?"
"Yes, I have a room that I could let, but I do not want to let it. I have only two rooms, and there are six of us already, and the boys and girls are growing up. But school books cost money, and my husband is ailing, and when he is well it is only thirty-five shillings a week. And six shillings of that is for the rent, and three shillings of that is for the rent, and three shillings for travelling, and a shilling that we may all be buried decently, and a shilling for the books, and three shillings is for clothes and that is little enough, and a shilling for my husband's beer, and a shilling for his tobacco, and these I do not grudge for he is a decent man and does not gamble or spend his money on other women, and a shilling for the Church, and a shilling for sickness. And that leaves seventeen shillings for food for six, and we are always hungry. Yes I have a room but I do not want to let it. How much could you pay?"
"I could pay three shillings a week for the room."
"And I would not take it."
"Three shillings and sixpence."
"Three shillings and sixpence. You can't fill your stomach on privacy. You need privacy when your children are growing up, but you can't fill your stomach on it. Yes, I shall take three shillings and sixpence.”
― Alan Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country

“As the sun began to rise, the man reached out to the woman, and they clasped hands. He cradled her, and languidly they lifted themselves up to their feet, their bodies brushing, their eyes lost in each other's. Sensuously, deliberately, they danced, moving as though they were one, their body language smooth as their limbs carefully unfolded. They twirled and rocked, intertwined and separated, nearly leaning onto one another but barely touching, their movements sometimes tender, sometimes almost violent...Moments passed while the dancers held tight to each other, as though their bodies were melting together. The expression on their features as they lifted their faces to the sky was one of unimaginable joy.”
― Hannah Fielding

“Even if Zuma was to develop the authoritarian impulses of a Mugabe, he would be checked—not least by his own party, which set a continental precedent by ousting Thabo Mbeki in 2007, after it felt he had outstayed his welcome by seeking a third term as party president. The ANC appears to have set itself against that deathtrap of African democracy: the ruler for life.”
― Mark Gevisser

“What i took away from witnessing the broken climbers in Moshi was this: *Everything is easy until it isn't.*”
― Josh Gates, Destination Truth: Memoirs of a Monster Hunter

“When traveling in rural Africa, it's important to not actually *go* to a hospital until the patient is on the brink of expiration, otherwise things are apt to get worse.”
― Josh Gates, Destination Truth: Memoirs of a Monster Hunter

“Some say that because the United States was wrong before, it cannot possibly be right now, or has not the right to be right. (The British Empire sent a fleet to Africa and the Caribbean to maintain the slave trade while the very same empire later sent another fleet to enforce abolition. I would not have opposed the second policy because of my objections to the first; rather it seems to me that the second policy was morally necessitated by its predecessor.)”
― Christopher Hitchens, A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq

“That would be Axelroot all over, to turn up with an extra wife or two claiming that's how they do it here. Maybe he's been in Africa so long he's forgotten that we Christians have our own system of marriage, and it's called Monotony.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

“I thought I was getting away from politics for a while. But I now realise that the vuvuzela is to these World Cup blogs what Julius Malema is to my politics columns: a noisy, but sadly unavoidable irritant. With both Malema and the vuvuzela, their importance is far overstated. Malema: South Africa's Robert Mugabe? I think not. The vuvuzela: an archetypal symbol of 'African culture?' For African civilisation's sake, I seriously hope not.

Both are getting far too much airtime than they deserve. Both have thrust themselves on to the world stage through a combination of hot air and raucous bluster. Both amuse and enervate in roughly equal measure. And both are equally harmless in and of themselves — though in Malema's case, it is the political tendency that he represents, and the right-wing interests that lie behind his diatribes that is dangerous. With the vuvu I doubt if there are such nefarious interests behind the scenes; it may upset the delicate ears of the middle classes, both here and at the BBC, but I suspect that South Africa's democracy will not be imperilled by a mass-produced plastic horn.”
― Richard Calland

“But in Africa bureaucrats are usually too proud to accept a bribe, something I admire when I'm not the one being arrested.”
― Tahir Shah, In Search of King Solomon's Mines

“In Africa, there is a birthrate trap: a higher standard of living will lead to smaller families but smaller families will not lead to a higher standard of living.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“As anyone who's ever taken an Ethiopian bus knows, there is an unwritten rule that the windows must remain firmly closed.”
― Tahir Shah, In Search of King Solomon's Mines

“Gradually the mist had lifted, and the sun burst forth, a ball of fire radiating the sky with unnaturally incandescent hues. Coral was reminded of the strident brushwork and wild colours of the Fauvist paintings that filled her mother's gallery, which Coral had always loved. The scene was now set for the show to begin: the drama in which the broad, breath-taking landscapes of Africa were the stage and the animals the actors.”
― Hannah Fielding, Burning Embers

“He emerged out of the lake, the declining sun drenching him with aureate light, the droplets on his body iridescent in their beams. He walked confidently toward her, almost every inch of his sculptured body exposed in his black swimsuit. Each sharp contour of muscle glistened, each limb unfolded with lithe grace as he approached, his eyes riveted on her. Coral watched spellbound, a yearning surging up within her, eager and expectant. The air around them trembled with infinite anticipation.”
― Hannah Fielding

“La littérature est un théâtre à ciel ouvert qui permet de transformer les êtres les plus simples en héros universels, loin des parterres présomptueux.
Conrad, Le Voyageur de l'inquiétude”
― Olivier Weber

“the sense of a small courageous community barely existing above the desert of trees, hemmed in by a sun too fierce to work under and a darkness filled with evil spirits - love was an arm round the neck, a cramped embrace in the smoke, wealth a little pile of palm-nuts, old age sores and leprosy, religion a few stones in the centre of the village where the dead chiefs lay, a grove of trees where the rice birds, like yellow and green canaries, built their nests, a man in a mask with raffia skirts dancing at burials. This never varied, only their kindness to strangers, the extent of their poverty and the immediacy of their terrors. Their laughter and their happiness seemed the most courageous things in nature”
― Graham Greene

“Everybody looks at oil and almost entirely forget that the percentage of jobs the oil sector creates is relatively small compared to the population; the introduction of more sophisticated exploration methods makes it even worse. Oil companies now look for smarter, leaner and cheaper operations. Where will these leave the economy? Good disposable income to the government with no real value to the people of the Niger Delta.”
― Emi Iyalla

“The Yoruba terms obinrin and okunrin do express a distinction. Reproduction is, obviously, the basis of human existence, and given its import, and the primacy of anafemale [anatomical female] body-type, it is not surprising that the Yoruba language describes the two types of anatomy. The terms okunrin and obinrin, however, merely indicate the physiological differences between the two anatomies as they have to do with procreation and intercourse. They refer, then, to the physically marked and physiologically apparent differences between the two anatomies. They do not refer to gender categories that connote social privileges and disadvantages. Also, they do not express sexual dimorphism because the distinction they indicate is specific to issues of reproduction. To appreciate this point, it would be necessary to go back to the fundamental difference between the conception of the Yoruba social world and that of Western societies.”
“… I argued that the biological determinism in much of Western thought stems from the application of biological explanations in accounting for social hierarchies. This in turn has led to the construction of the social world with biological building blocks. Thus the social and the biological are thoroughly intertwined. This worldview is manifested in male-dominant gender discourses, discourses in which female biological differences are used to explain female sociopolitical disadvantages. The conception of biology as being ‘everywhere’ makes it possible to use it as an explanation in any realm, whether it is directly implicated or not. Whether the question is why women should not vote or why they breast-feed babies, the explanation is one and the same: they are biologically predisposed.”
“The upshot of this cultural logic is that men and women are perceived as essentially different creatures. Each category is defined by its own essence. Diane Fuss describes the notion that things have a ‘true essence … as a belief in the real, the invariable and fixed properties which define the whatness of an entity.’ Consequently, whether women are in the labor room or in the boardroom, their essence is said to determine their behavior. In both arenas, then, women’s behavior is by definition different from that of men. Essentialism makes it impossible to confine biology to one realm. The social world, therefore, cannot truly be socially constructed.”
― Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyèwùmí , The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses

“We, in Africa, have no more need of being 'converted' to socialism than we have of being 'taught' democracy. Both are rooted in our past -- in the traditional society which produced us.”
― Julius Nyerere

“A nation which refuses to learn from foreign culture is nothing but a nation of idiots and lunatics... But to learn from other cultures does not mean we should abandon our own.”
― Julius Nyerere

“He looked around the church, at the altar, the tabernacle, the brass candles, and the European saints, pale like albinos in the dark continent.”
― Graham Greene, A Burnt-Out Case

“It felt odd and poetic and encouraging coming back after so many years, a shape imposing itself on life again after chaos.”
― Graham Greene, In Search of a Character

“In Africa, when you pick up a book worth reading, out of the deadly consignments which good ships are being made to carry out all the way from Europe, you read it as an author would like his book to be read, praying to God that he may have it in him to go on as beautifully as he has begun. Your mind runs, transported, upon a fresh deep green track.”
― Karen Blixen, Out of Africa