People say that if you find water rising up to your ankle, that's the time to do something about it, not when it's around your neck.

The last four or five hundred years of European contact with Africa produced a body of literature that presented Africa in a very bad light and Africans in very lurid terms. The reason for this had to do with the need to justify the slave trade and slavery.

I prefer to go on trying all kinds of things, not to be told, This is the way it is done.

When an old man dies, a library burns to the ground.

The damage done in one year can sometimes take ten or twenty years to repair.

My parents were early converts to Christianity in my part of Nigeria. They were not just converts; my father was an evangelist, a religious teacher. He and my mother traveled for thirty-five years to different parts of Igboland, spreading the gospel.

The lizard that jumped from a high Iroko tree to the ground said he would praise himself if no-one else did.