African quotes and aphorisms, ideas, citations and great thoughts on Africa, but not only, by famous and wise African writers, authors and politicians.
The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line – the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea. It was a phase of this problem that caused the Civil War.
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868-1963, American historian, educator, writer, journalist)
The strange thing about Africa is how past, present and future come together in a kind of rough jazz, if you like.”
Ben Okri, ‘Magical Ben Okri casts a spell on his readers,’ Interview with Nima Elbagir, CNN, 2011.
I am fifty-two years of age. I am a bishop in the Anglican Church, and a few people might be constrained to say that I was reasonably responsible. In the land of my birth I cannot vote, whereas a young person of eighteen can vote. And why? Because he or she possesses that wonderful biological attribute – a white skin.
Bishop Desmond Tutu (1931-, South African prelate)
Morals are in all countries the result of legislation and government; they are not African or Asian or European: they are good or bad.
Denis Diderot (1713-1784, French philosopher)
To be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.
Nelson Mandela (1918-2013, South African president)
Every morning in Africa, a Gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning a Lion wakes up. It knows it must outrun the slowest Gazelle or it will starve to death. It doesn’t matter whether you are a Lion or a Gazelle… when the sun comes up, you’d better be running.
Author Unknown
Passion is never enough; neither is skill.
Toni Morrison (1931-, African-American novelist)
Africa has her mysteries, and even a wise man cannot understand them. But a wise man respects them.
Miriam Makeba
I dream of the realization of the unity of Africa, whereby its leaders combine in their efforts to solve the problems of this continent. I dream of our vast deserts, of our forests, of all our great wildernesses.”
Nelson ‘Madiba’ Mandela.
Few can sojourn long within the unspoilt wilderness of a game sanctuary, surrounded on all sides by its confiding animals, without absorbing its atmosphere; the Spirit of the Wild is quick to assert supremacy, and no man of any sensibility can resist her.”
James Stevenson-Hamilton, first warden of South Africa’s Sabi Nature Reserve.
Exile as a mode of genius no longer exists; in place of Joyce we have the fragments of work appearing in Index on Censorship.
Nadine Gordimer (1923-2014, South African author)
By the definition accepted in the United States, any person with even a small amount of (African American) Blood… is an (African American). Logically, it would be exactly as justifiable to say that any person with even a small amount of white blood is white. Why do they say one rather than the other? Because the former classification suits the convenience of those making the classification. Society, in short, regards as true those systems that produce the desired results. Science seeks only the most generally useful systems of classification. These it regards for the time being, until more useful classifications are invented as true.
S. I. Hayakawa (1902-1992, Canadian born American senator, educator)
How soon country people forget. When they fall in love with a city it is forever, and it is like forever. As though there never was a time when they didn’t love it. The minute they arrive at the train station or get off the ferry and glimpse the wide streets and the wasteful lamps lighting them, they know they are born for it. There, in a city, they are not so much new as themselves: their stronger, riskier selves.
Toni Morrison (1931-, African-American novelist)
We make a mistake forsaking England and moving out into the periphery of life. After all, Taormina, Ceylon, Africa, America – as far as we go, they are only the negation of what we ourselves stand for and are: and we’re rather like Jonahs running away from the place we belong.
D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930, British author)
Africa is mystic; it is wild; it is a sweltering inferno; it is a photographer’s paradise, a hunter’s Valhalla, an escapist’s Utopia. It is what you will, and it withstands all interpretations. It is the last vestige of a dead world or the cradle of a shiny new one. To a lot of people, as to myself, it is just home.”
Beryl Markham, ‘West With The Night,’1942.
There is always something new out of Africa.
Pliny The Elder (c.23-79, Roman neophatonist)
You can no longer see or identify yourself solely as a member of a tribe, but as a citizen of a nation of one people working toward a common purpose.
Idowu koyenikan
There are as many Africas as there are books about Africa – and as many books about it as you could read in a leisurely lifetime. Whoever writes a new one can afford a certain complacency in the knowledge that his is a new picture agreeing with no one else’s, but likely to be haughtily disagreed with by all those who believed in some other Africa. … Being thus all things to all authors, it follows, I suppose, that Africa must be all things to all readers.
Beryl Markham, “West With The Night,’ 1942.
Africa has her mysteries, and even a wise man cannot understand them. But a wise man respects them.
Miriam Makeba, ‘Makeba: My Story,’ 1988.
The African mind has a lot to contribute, not only to world understanding of the arts, but to an understanding of spiritualism. That is the contribution Africa will make to the world of the future – an injection of sanity into the environment of the universe itself.
Fela Kuti, Nigerian music pioneer.
For Africa to me… is more than a glamorous fact. It is a historical truth. No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place.”
Maya Angelou, African-American Poet.
Why is it you can never hope to describe the emotion Africa creates? You are lifted. Out of whatever pit, unbound from whatever tie, released from whatever fear. You are lifted and you see it all from above.
Francesca Marciano, ‘Rules Of The Wild: A Novel Of Africa,’ 1998.
You can’t hate the roots of a tree and not hate the tree. You can’t hate Africa and not hate yourself.
Malcolm X, Speech at Ford Auditorium, 1965.
Africans must change their mind and actions. The keys to building your continent depends on your will-power, persistent effort and action towards self liberation.
Lailah Gifty Akita
The country of the tourist pamphlet always is another country, an embarrassing abstraction of the desirable that, thank God, does not exist on this planet, where there are always ants and bad smells and empty Coca-Cola bottles to keep the grubby finger-print of reality upon the beautiful.
Nadine Gordimer (1923-2014, South African author)
There is no passion to be found playing small – in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living.
Nelson Mandela (1918-2013, South African president)
We must use time wisely and forever realize that the time is always ripe to do right.
Nelson Mandela (1918-2013, South African president)
The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.
Steven Biko (1946-1977, South African political activist)
Irish Americans are no more Irish than Black Americans are Africans.
Bob Geldof (1954-, Irish rock musician, philanthropist)
Exploitation and oppression is not a matter of race. It is the system, the apparatus of world-wide brigandage called imperialism, which made the Powers behave the way they did. I have no illusions on this score, nor do I believe that any Asian nation or African nation, in the same state of dominance, and with the same system of colonial profit-amassing and plunder, would have behaved otherwise.
Suyin Han (1917-, Chinese novelist and doctor)
Censorship is never over for those who have experienced it. It is a brand on the imagination forever affecting the individual who has suffered it.
Nadine Gordimer (1923-2014, South African author)
Communists have always played an active role in the fight by colonial countries for their freedom, because the short-term objects of Communism would always correspond with the long-term objects of freedom movements.
Nelson Mandela (1918-2013, South African president)
Truth isn’t always beauty, but the hunger for it is.
Nadine Gordimer (1923-2014, South African author)
Perhaps the best definition of progress would be the continuing efforts of men and women to narrow the gap between the convenience of the powers that be and the unwritten charter.
Nadine Gordimer (1923-2014, South African author)
It is an achievement for a man to do his duty on earth irrespective of the consequences.
Nelson Mandela (1918-2013, South African president)
There is no moral authority like that of sacrifice.
Nadine Gordimer (1923-2014, South African author)
If people would forget about utopia! When rationalism destroyed heaven and decided to set it up here on earth, that most terrible of all goals entered human ambition. It was clear there’d be no end to what people would be made to suffer for it.
Nadine Gordimer (1923-2014, South African author)
The primacy of the word, basis of the human psyche, that has in our age been used for mind-bending persuasion and brain-washing pulp, disgraced by Gobbles and debased by advertising copy, remains a force for freedom that flies out between all bars.
Nadine Gordimer (1923-2014, South African author)
The gap between the committed and the indifferent is a Sahara whose faint trails, followed by the mind’s eye only, fade out in sand.
Nadine Gordimer (1923-2014, South African author)
To me, the greatest thing that has happened on this earth of ours is the rise of the human race to the vision of God. That story of the human rise to what I call the vision of God is the story which is told in the Bible.
Jan Christian Smuts (1870-1950, South African Prime Minister)
We must use time wisely and forever realize that the time is always ripe to do right.
Nelson Mandela (1918-2013, South African president)
To be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.
Nelson Mandela (1918-2013, South African president)
We may encounter many defeats but we must not be defeated.
Maya Angelou (1928-, African-American poet, writer, performer)
A man is not defeated by his opponents but by himself.
Jan Christian Smuts (1870-1950, South African Prime Minister)
Each of us has the right and the responsibility to asses the roads which lie ahead and those over which we have traveled, and if the feature road looms ominous or unpromising, and the road back uninviting-inviting, then we need to gather our resolve and carrying only the necessary baggage, step off that road into another direction. If the new choice is also unpalatable, without embarrassment, we must be ready to change that one as well.
Maya Angelou (1928-, African-American poet, writer, performer)
Good men prefer to be accountable.
Michael Edwardes (1930-, South African-born British industrialist)
Responsibility is what awaits outside the Eden of Creativity.
Nadine Gordimer (1923-2014, South African author)
Let freedom reign. The sun never set on so glorious a human achievement.
Nelson Mandela (1918-2013, South African president)
Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts.
Nelson Mandela (1918-2013, South African president)
We must use time wisely and forever realize that the time is always ripe to do right.
Nelson Mandela (1918-2013, South African president)
Wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.
Toni Morrison (1931-, African-American novelist)
Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?
Nadine Gordimer (1923-2014, South African author)
The primacy of the word, basis of the human psyche, that has in our age been used for mind-bending persuasion and brain-washing pulp, disgraced by Gobbles and debased by advertising copy, remains a force for freedom that flies out between all bars.
Nadine Gordimer (1923-2014, South African author)
Genius is an African who dreams up snow.
Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977, Russian-born American novelist, poet)
I am a leader by default, only because nature does not allow a vacuum.
Bishop Desmond Tutu (1931-, South African prelate)
I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.
Nelson Mandela (1918-2013, South African president)
In a democracy – even if it is a so-called democracy like our white-elitist one – the greatest veneration one can show the rule of law is to keep a watch on it, and to reserve the right to judge unjust laws and the subversion of the function of the law by the power of the state. That vigilance is the most important proof of respect for the law.
Nadine Gordimer (1923-2014, South African author)
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