Apartheid Quotes

I would be guilty only if I were innocent of working to destroy racism in my country.

Nadine Gordimer

MOUNT PLAASMOORDEIf ever you visit South AfricaAnd doLeave the brilliant beaches of Cape Town for a momentClimb Mount Plaasmoorde Witkruis monumentAnd you’ll see the victims of apartheidWhite crosses marking a thousand white victimsPlanted in the earth of a million black victimsThey lie dissolved in the humus of the soilsThey were too many to have their own marked gravesToo many to build black crosses forAnd just too hard to forget aboutBecause they make the soil under your feet black

Dauglas Dauglas

There is one key area in which Zuma has made no attempt at reconciliation whatsoever: criminal justice and security. The ministers of justice, defence, intelligence (now called 'state security' in a throwback to both apartheid and the ANC's old Stalinist past), police and communications are all die-hard Zuma loyalists. Whatever their line functions, they will also play the role they have played so ably to date: keeping Zuma out of court—and making sure the state serves Zuma as it once did Mbeki.

I am usually able to tolerate all kinds of victims of indoctrination except those who have been infected with xenophobia, racism, or homophobia.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Many things in this period have been hard to bear, or hard to take seriously. My own profession went into a protracted swoon during the Reagan-Bush-Thatcher decade, and shows scant sign of recovering a critical faculty—or indeed any faculty whatever, unless it is one of induced enthusiasm for a plausible consensus President. (We shall see whether it counts as progress for the same parrots to learn a new word.) And my own cohort, the left, shared in the general dispiriting move towards apolitical, atonal postmodernism. Regarding something magnificent, like the long-overdue and still endangered South African revolution (a jagged fit in the supposedly smooth pattern of axiomatic progress), one could see that Ariadne’s thread had a robust reddish tinge, and that potential citizens had not all deconstructed themselves into Xhosa, Zulu, Cape Coloured or ‘Eurocentric’; had in other words resisted the sectarian lesson that the masters of apartheid tried to teach them. Elsewhere, though, it seemed all at once as if competitive solipsism was the signifier of the ‘radical’; a stress on the salience not even of the individual, but of the trait, and from that atomization into the lump of the category. Surely one thing to be learned from the lapsed totalitarian system was the unwholesome relationship between the cult of the masses and the adoration of the supreme personality. Yet introspective voyaging seemed to coexist with dull group-think wherever one peered about among the formerly ‘committ

Christopher Hitchens

Some men are so indoctrinated that they sincerely believe that other than cooking and cleaning the only thing that a woman can do better than them is being a woman.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

To protest about bullfighting in Spain, the eating of dogs in South Korea, or the slaughter of baby seals in Canada while continuing to eat eggs from hens who have spent their lives crammed into cages, or veal from calves who have been deprived of their mothers, their proper diet, and the freedom to lie down with their legs extended, is like denouncing apartheid in South Africa while asking your neighbors not to sell their houses to blacks.

I don't fancy colors of the face, I'm always attracted to colors of the brain.

Michael Bassey Johnson