There are people who say that if you are told that your house has fallen you don't ask what about the ceiling or what about the windows. The main thing is that this house, Africa, has fallen. Literature is just one aspect, pick any aspect of the situation.

Art is man's constant effort to create for himself a different order of reality from that which is given to him.

I'm very primitive; I write with a pen.

The language of young men is pull down and destroy; but an old man speaks of conciliation.

The rural areas have been deprived by the cities in the past. Development resources and energy should be directed where the people live.

We don't want to be simply wandering about without some kind of reason, we want our presence here to have a purpose, and that we are not going to end here, we are going to proceed somewhere else, and also that we didn't begin here, that we began somewhere else and all that living, all that elaborate account of our presence seems to be quite basic to our nature and so this is what literacy taps into.

Travellers with closed minds can tell us little except about themselves