African Authors Quotes

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.

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.

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

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

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

It doesn't have to be dreads. You can wear an Afro, or braids like you used to. There's a lot you can do with natural hair

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Relaxing your hair is like being in prison. You're caged in. Your hair rules you. You didn't go running with Curt today because you don't want to sweat out this straightness. You're always battling to make your hair do what it wasn't meant to do.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Alexa and the other guests, and perhaps even Georgina, all understood the fleeing from war, from the kind of poverty that crushed human souls, but they would not understand the need to escape from the oppressive lethargy of choicelessness. They would not understand why people like him who were raised well fed and watered but mired in dissatisfaction, conditioned from birth to look towards somewhere else, eternally convinced that real lives happened in that somewhere else, were now resolved to do dangerous things, illegal things, so as to leave, none of them starving, or raped, or from burned villages, but merely hungry for for choice and certainty.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

In any case how many took the oath and are now licking the toes of the whiteman?No, you take an oath to confirm a choice already made. The decision to lay or not lay your life for the people lies in the heart. The oath is the water sprinkled on a man's head at baptism

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

The night was so balmy that breathing ceased to be a habitual sensation, becoming much closer to something like the gaseous ingestion of a mango, the velvet caress of a hand or the soft skin of a fresh peach. Sleeping, lying down or sitting up, was, on that night, a divine human penitence, a miracle unexpected and unrealized, intuitive and peaceful in a unique opportunity.

Ondjaki

The headlines are never in the news! And so, what I am saying is the news is never on the headlines

Sahndra Fon Dufe

Don't you think our society is designed to kill in that way? Of course, you've surely heard about those tiny fish in the rivers of Brazil which attack the swimmer by the thousands, eat him up in a few moments in quick little mouthfuls and leave only a perfectly clean skeleton behind? So, that's the way they're constituted. 'Do you want a clean life, like everyone else?' Of course the answer is yes. How could you not? 'Fine. We'll clean you up. Here's a job, here's a family, here's some organized leisure.' And the little teeth bite into the flesh, right down to the bone. But i'm being unfair. I shouldn't have said, 'the way they're constituted', because after all, it's our way, too: it's a case of who strips whom.

The African continent has so many stories to tell, it's about time they are told, by them - not us.

Akilnathan Logeswaran

Among the Igbo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten.

What a mighty nation, we will be, if we encourage one another?

Lailah Gifty Akita

Yet Nathan appreciated being alone as he sipped his cold glass of beer. It gave him time to think. In the next thirty minutes or so, the flight he was waiting for would land and his day would begin. It was autumn in the capital, and the clear skies created an illusion of a city that was at peace with itself.

The morning was, therefore, a mixture of a plenitude of densities, from the presence of the placid birds, to the mundane premonition, to the spring of small glisters which accompanied that autumnal rain. The music, in a simple whistle, recreated a new universe with the parish and all the hearts that were witness to it- padre, pigeons, swallows, the world!- were clothed in a new carnivalesque colouring: a celebration from within.

Ondjaki

... after daybreak is when I will already have died. At that moment I will only know of beautiful things: the certainties, the desires. When the sun bathes me, I will be something else: without mirrors, without sadness. I will have passed away, but will have been reborn. I will whistle mellifluous melodies. Discredited but, in the end, light.

Ondjaki

The elders say- difficult to prove- that winged creatures also dream. The birds are lovers of heights, always searching out landing spots, never constant here at the foot of the human race. 'It's that they discovered a magical advantage...' they say, 'the sound of silence.'At the foot of the clouds the raindrops come earlier, it's true, and the silence of the sky is something unattainable for those who don't fly- we have never experimented. The dream of the birds was that man of them headed for a land where they experienced a similar magic to that lived by them.In the final analysis, music is the only human sound similar to that of silence.

Ondjaki

No matter how great the love, the pain, the sadness, the power of a heart, no one can recreate the sea. Nowhere else.

Ondjaki

Africa PRODUCES what it does NOT CONSUME and CONSUMES what it does NOT PRODUCE.

Why did Africa let Europe cart away millions of Africa's souls from the continent to the four corners of the wind? How could Europe lord it over a continent ten times its size? Why does needy Africa continue to let its wealth meet the needs of those outside its borders and then follow behind with hands outstretched for a loan of the very wealth it let go? How did we arrive at this, that the best leader is the one that knows how to beg for a share of what he has already given away at the price of a broken tool? Where is the future of Africa?

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

The endlessness of the extent of that whistle resulted, without a doubt, also in an enormous metaphysical knowledge of the art of whistling, which mingled, not just with the hearing of people, but extended, in an incisive manner, to the depths of their souls, the protected corner where each one hid their things- that frightening cave, which many call the centre of their being.

Ondjaki

The window of her sadness was so vast that it almost opened a path to her soul.

Ondjaki

In such a regime, I say you died a good death if your life had inspired someone to come forward and shoot your murdered in the chest - without asking to be paid.

In such a regime, I say you died a good death if your life had inspired someone to come forward and shoot your murderer in the chest - without asking to be paid.

Looking at a king's mouth, ' said an old man, 'one would think he never sucked at his mother's breast.

The IGAD-Plus's compromise peace agreement is probably pregnant with a noisy, perhaps thunderous baby.

VOA no longer felt like a sanctuary but rather a mirage and we were desert wanderers.

Brima Lamin & Chantale Wesley-Lamin

It was as if hell itself had taken human form and come up from the abyss.

Brima Lamin & Chantale Wesley-Lamin

Inside, I screamed for help but the words knew better than to escape my lips.

Brima Lamin & Chantale Wesley-Lamin

He was a nobody. Yet and still, he held the gun and therfore all of the power.

Brima Lamin & Chantale Wesley-Lamin

I’ll never forget the magic of our Saturday nights. Special moments carved in my mind by you the sculptor of my love. Let’s dance the night away. Who needs music, when your heart already sings to me.

~ Fidelis O Mkparu (2016)

A PHD is not the end of education. Education exists even among the bees who feed their queen only with the purest

Sahndra Fon Dufe

Whatever you are looking for is also looking for you. You see, don't only look. Be available and ready when it shows up

Sahndra Fon Dufe

Don't set your goals by what other people deem important.

Jaachynma N.E. Agu

Don't blow off another's candle for it won't make yours shine brighter.

Jaachynma N.E. Agu