Africa Quotes - Page 2

If people's night fears of sorcery - which negatively influences their decision to use mosquito nets - fail to impress the outsider, the brute everyday reality remains; in a number of rural African villages it is still much too common for very real hyenas to snatch people, especially children, out of their own homes as they lie sleeping at night, because of the lack of a good front door.

T.K. Naliaka

When an entire segment of the world is burned and reduced to a lawless battleground for thugs and mercenaries, a land where government does not exist, where the slate of history is being wiped out and hope has drowned in gallons of innocent blood, the only respite comes in the form of the open seas and what lies beyond the horizon. So ships are boarded and pain is tolerated just a little while longer.

Aysha Taryam

Will Brazilian antigambiae measures succeed in Africa? As time goes by it will almost certainly be found that an increasing number of areas can be cleaned of gambiae and be freed of gambiae-transmitted malaria. In Africa, where the species is already widely disseminated, it would seem logical to attempt eradication by beginning in the center of the area to be cleaned and working always outward. It has been demonstrated in Brazil that species eradication of Aedes aegypti and Anopheles gambiae is feasible.

Fred Lowe Soper

Deep in the heart of the hot, wet African rainforest, there lives a tribe of peacemakers who share a multiplicity of pleasures and make a very special kind of love. South of the sprawling Congo River, in the midst of war-ravaged territory, some 2,000 miles from the arid Ethiopian desert where the oldest human fossils have been found, lies this lush and steamy jungle paradise, the only natural habitat of the bonobo.

Susan Block

The trouble was, Elizabeth thought, they did not tell the children of colonial families not to love these foreign lands, not to fall in love with their birthplaces. While parents dreamt of retiring in peace to another place called ‘home’, their children soaked up knowledge of the only world they knew: its different peoples, its spicy food, its birdsong, the way warm rain fell like a curtain through the palm trees. Their souls would be forever torn.

Anne M. Chappel

Denys had a way of seeing everything as if he knew it would never be there exactly the same again. He understood how nothing ever holds still for us, or should. The trick is learning to take things as they come and fully, too, with no resistence or fear, not trying to grip them too tightly or make them bend.

Paula McLain

My cardinal belief is that it is the natives of the land that till the land best, with passion and meaning. The advanced nations of this world built their countries by the sweat of their indigenes.

Nana Awere Damoah

It is only by our hands that we can build this continent to the standard that we envy and admire in the advanced countries.

Nana Awere Damoah

Oral tradition is practised in most African cultures: ideals, family histories and legacies are handed down from one generation to the other physically or verbally. However, this system is flawed in the sense that a lot of African innovation, experience and culture have been lost, undocumented.

Nana Awere Damoah

Come to Africa and help! Wherever you may be in the world, there is something you can give back to the continent that gave you a name and an identity, at least.

Nana Awere Damoah

This stupidity of sounding a siren and speeding through traffic with a coffin must be an African speciality.

Nana Awere Damoah

I learnt years ago not to use logic to understand African politics.

Nana Awere Damoah

Nkrumah declared that we faced neither East nor West but we faced forward. But, see, we can face forward and just look at the horizon. Sometimes, as I think of Ghana, I am tempted to believe that we kept looking East and West and never made up our minds, so we just stood still.

Nana Awere Damoah

Shovels aren't very glamorous, but they've been liberating entire communities from malaria for the past 5,000 years.

T.K. Naliaka

It is a shame that the very people who used education to clamber out of the disadvantages they had grown up in, have drawn up the ladder after them.

Nana Ama Amamoo

Rome was not built in a day, but it was built everyday.

Nana Awere Damoah

You have to understand – there is a romance to Africa. You can see a sunset and believe you have witnessed the hand of God. You watch the slow lope of a lioness and forget to breathe. You marvel at the tripod of a giraffe bent to water. In Africa, there are iridescent blues on the wings of birds that you do not see anywhere else in nature. In Africa, in the midday heat, you can see blisters in the atmosphere. When you are in Africa, you feel primordial, rocked in the cradle of the world.

Jodi Picoult

Our cultural roots are the most ancient in the world. The spiritual concepts of our Ancestors gave birth to religious thought African people believe in the oneness of the African family through sacred time, which unites the past, the present and the future. Our Ancestors live with us.

Marimba Ani

As we stand on the precipice of a life of ministry, we will have to answer the question that Jesus poses to each one of us: Are you willing to count the cost?

Erica Mbasan

By the Middle Ages… the introduction of the Trivium was well-known: SÂDI, an educated black from Tombouctou, author of the well-known work entitled, ‘Tarikh es-Soudan’ cites amongst the subjects that he mastered, logic, dialection, grammar, rhetoric, not to mention law and other disciplines...the long lists of subjects studied and the lettered African intellectuals who taught them at the University of Tombouctou…

Cheikh Anta Diop

Africa was full of people in need of help and there had to be a limit. You simply could not help everybody; but you could at least help those who came into your life. That principle allowed you to deal with the suffering you saw. That was your suffering. Other people would have to deal with the suffering that they, in their turn, came across.

Alexander McCall Smith

This friendship among women is something Samuel often talks about. Because the women share a husband but the husband does not share their friendships, it makes Samuel uneasy. It is confusing, I suppose. And it is Samuel's duty as a Christian minister to preach the bible's directive of one husband and one wife. Samuel is confused because ti him, since the women are friends and will do anything for one another - not always, but more often than anyone from America would expect - and since they giggle and gossip and nurse each other's children, then they must be happy with things as they are. (Walker 2000: 141)

Alice Walker

...it was just a version of Rimbaud in Harar: the exile, a selfish beast with modest fantasies of power, secretly enjoying a life of beer drinking and scribbling and occasional mythomania in a nice climate where there were no interruptions, such as unwelcome letters or faxes or cell phones. It was an eccentric ideal, life lived off the map.¨

Paul Theroux

There, in the Levantine crossroads between Europe, Africa, and Asia, the sovereign nation of Israel would exemplify what right looks like.

James Mikołajczyk

At one level the story of the second fall of Zimbabwe can be read as tragic yet a courageous one: a simple but soaring binary about unfounded courage in the face of immeasurable oppression. But at another level, it is a window into a much more complex, perhaps even darker and sadder, narrative about contemporary slaveship and the terrible collision of aspiration and frustration and the need to survive that has been unleashed upon the people of Zimbabwe. Exploitation and oppression are not matters of race.

Thabo Katlholo

As an ancient cradle of Iron Age civilization, Zimbabwe has a great emotional importance to the economy of Southern Africa and that's especially true for Botswana since both countries are landlocked. Harare was the site of some historic scenes and the best trade regimes, and it is where generations of Southern African children have gone for their education. Bulawayo was a trade giant amongst the people of the north – the Bakalanga, the Venda and the Shona. Now brick-by-brick the empire was facing a second fall after the last fall of the Great Zimbabwe.

Thabo Katlholo

To understand what happened in Zimbabwe its worth trying to see things through the Zimbabwean people prism for a moment. Immune from the propaganda and the western media mind- bend. The real issues started a long, long time ago before the current regimes. Those who came bearing greed and seeking to rip off the cradle of Sub-Saharan Africa orchestrated the demise the people of Zimbabwe found themselves reeling in

Thabo Katlholo

It’s not that easy living with malaria. The reality of the high annual death toll should make that very obvious.

T.K. Naliaka

African despots are all the same, they think they can wake up one morning and create themselves a Kingdom and rule over it and pass it over to their children and grandchildren. They don't get one thing you can't be a descendant of a title less class, with no trace of royal DNA and just subject yourself to people.

Allan Amanyire

Dirty politicians, corrupt leaders and thieves are sent to the Ugandan parliament and state house by lazy Ugandans who don’t go to vote.

Allan Amanyire

People who don't exercise their freedom of voting (choosing their leaders) are irresponsible. Such people have no right to complain or want more than what they are receiving from the government. Intentional failure to vote is cowardly, irresponsible and a sign of ignorance.

Allan Amanyire

..for Africa was in a way none of them could explain linked up with heaven and they thought of the two places with the same reverence and ultimate longing.

Elizabeth Yates

Not much was said of Gaberone except its riches and its danger. The prisons were said to be in-escapable, the shanty towns cheap, the police didn’t bother the illegal immigrants unless they were caught committing crimes. A dangerous paradise.

Thabo Katlholo

A Motswana in Zambia or Zimbabwe was referred to as gwerekwere and so was a Zimbabwean or Zambian in Botswana. Post-colonialism tragedy.

Thabo Katlholo

As it was, being a Zimbabwean immigrant was the worst thing a person could be in Southern Africa. They were the new Hebrews – homeless.

Thabo Katlholo

We are the third world not because the sun rises on the West and sets in the East but because we have engaged the reverse gear and we are moving with jet like speed in the wrong direction -we must change this by rolling up our sleeves and working for the growth of our country.

Patrick L.O. Lumumba

This land has brought forth numerous children, favouring both the bad and the good ones. It is not the land that is responsible for the people’s hardships, it is the people themselves. Pg.8

Obehi Peter Ewanfoh

Sometimes when you're hurting, it helps to throw yourself at something that will take your weight.

Paula McLain

We can only go to the limits of ourselves. Anything more and we give too much away. Then we're not good for anyone.

Paula McLain

AFC Leopards were as thrilling a side as ever took the pitch and they dominated East African football in the eighties. That Kenyan players were an excitable bunch was attested to in one memorable Leopards match, with the opposing goalkeeper being handcuffed and dragged away to jail by police.

David Bennun

Yes, many years of oppression may have complicated things and it seems impossible for blacks to create their own means of production. But, I truly believe that we must start somewhere. We must reimagine a world where we are proudly black and support all things black in order to reinvent the economic wheel. We talk. We produce theories. We prove ourselves and and and... But we must also put our money where our mouths and theories are. This is why we fight each and every single day.

Malebo Sephodi

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

The Whiteman told of another country beyond the sea where a powerful woman sat on a throne while men and women danced under the shadow of her authority and benevolence. She was ready to spread the shadow to cover the Agikuyu. They laughed at this eccentric man whose skin had been so scalded that the black outside had peeled off. The hot water must have gone into his head.Nevertheless, his words about a woman on the throne echoed something in the heart, deep down in their history. It was many, many years ago. Then women ruled the land of the Agikuyu. Men had no property, they were only there to serve the whims and needs of the women. Those were hard years. So they waited for women to go to war, they plotted a revolt, taking an oath of secrecy to keep them bound each to each in the common pursuit of freedom. They would sleep with all the women at once, for didn't they know the heroines would return hungry for love and relaxation? Fate did the rest; women were pregnant; the takeover met with little resistance.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

Africa has within it everything it needs to reach the peace. But Africa does not do Africa, Africa does foreigners

Seun Ajibade

Ghana, a land full of Gold! Africa, a land full of resources!

Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Y'know, there's a very interesting state of Anarchy up there. Everything's cracking up. That lot of tycoons; they don't believe in anything. They remind me of the white people in Central Africa. They used to say, 'Well, of course the blacks will drive us into the sea in fifty years time'. They used to say it cheerfully. In other words, 'We know that what we're doing is wrong.

Doris Lessing

They sang that song which distills all the suffering and the hope of Africa; that song which had inspired and comforted so many, “Nkosi Sikeleli Afrika,” God Bless Africa, give her life, watch over her children.

Alexander McCall Smith

We teach people in order to open up their minds and release their captive powers. But we cannot predict the result. Freedom - we free their minds from superstition. We give the people the keys of the future to act therein as they wish.

Tayeb Salih

She believed in getting as much use as possible from everything, and thought that as long as machinery, or anything else, could be cajoled into operation, it should be kept; to do otherwise, she thought, was wasteful.

Alexander McCall Smith

It was hard to disappear completely in Botswana, where there were fewer than two million people and where people had a healthy curiosity as to who was who and where people had come from. It was very difficult to be anonymous, even in Gaborone, as there would always be neighbours who would want to know exactly what one was doing and who one’s people had been.

Alexander McCall Smith

Freedom is not a privilege for some but a right for ALL

Lazarus Takawira

Most people write me off when they see me.They do not know my story.They say I am just an African.They judge me before they get to know me.What they do not know isThe pride I have in the blood that runs through my veins;The pride I have in my rich culture and the history of my people;The pride I have in my strong family ties and the deep connection to my community;The pride I have in the African music, African art, and African dance;The pride I have in my name and the meaning behind it.Just as my name has meaning, I too will live my life with meaning.So you think I am nothing?Don’t worry about what I am now,For what I will be, I am gradually becoming.I will raise my head high wherever I goBecause of my African pride,And nobody will take that away from me.

Idowu Koyenikan

After a little while you became aware of how still it was out here. Now, looking back on my life in Africa, I feel like it might altogether be described as the existence of a person who had come from a rushed and noisy world, into a still country.

Isak Dinesen

But this is africa, so hardly anything is normal.

Alexandra Fuller

The only thing that makes me sad is that I shall be leaving Africa when I die. I love Africa, which is my mother and my father. When I am dead, I shall miss the smell of Africa

Alexander McCall Smith

Almost astride the Equator, night fell like a portcullis. The sun dropped below the horizon and suddenly all was dark.

Tim Butcher

Love in the DaytimeMy loverShines like the sun.I may be burnedBlack as a frying pan,Sweating bucketsAnd keeling overWith vertigo,But why worry?My loverShines like the sun.She pours over my bodyAnd breathes into my soul.It feels so goodWhen she lightsMy love on fireLike dry wood.Translated from Tigrinya by Charles Cantalupo with Ghirmai Negash

Reesom Haile

Making wine and drinking wine is not new to African Americans and others in the Diaspora. South Africa has a three-century history in growing, harvesting and distilling grapes as wine. The entire continent of Africa has a history in wine-making. In this country, slaves cultivated the vineyards owned by Thomas Jefferson and other vintners.

Andre Hueston Mack

Africa had a way of coming back and simply covering everything up again.

Alexander McCall Smith

I love Africa....... Each day each breath, she consumes me. I have never changed so much In such a short time Each day I feel more part of her. Her colour, smell, her smiles , the ever changing landscapes. Vast deserts rolling hills plaines & Mountains. Her beauty and her majesty. Like sweet wine flowing through my veins, my heart sings as I wave to all those faces going by. Back home to my Grandmothers Birth place. They said “welcome home”, those village boys. How did they know? You all said I would cry, I thought no, but yes I often do. Not for their pain but for their happiness . I cry now, together hearts will sing ,” I love Africa”. See her now as I write.. Kilimanjaro , it doesn’t get much better .Tears on a hard mans face. There is no time but now , no words just peace. Thousands of smiling faces, the mass of souls are singing out . Yes I see and feel it now.... In those trees I sense the Spirits of our saving , could it be our looking for? Sailing ships a familiar shore, now I’m crying happy and singing . Thoughts intense of please no more. I love Africa. An epiphany I can’t explain .Not like the ancient rituals , sound of rain, and men together by campfires. Beginning to end but there really is no such thing as time, just imaginings. We still love sitting by the camp fire and we love listening to the rain? I love Africa the Eden and our Birthplace , Man. How can I explain to you my friend what I have seen and felt unless you too have seen it all ... Africa. Michael Burke.

Michael Burke

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Africa Quotes - Page 2

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