Quotes About Africa

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?

Entrepreneurship is the cornerstone to African development and the key to local value creation in Africa. I am determined to ensure that Africa's next generation of entrepreneurs have the platform they need to turn their entrepreneurial aspirations into sustainable businesses that will drive economic growth and job creation across Africa.

Libya faces along to the Mediterranean and had been effectively the cork in the bottle of Africa. So all problems, economic problems and civil war in Africa - previously people fleeing those problems didn't end up in Europe because Libya policed the Mediterranean. That was said explicitly at the time, back in early 2011 by Gaddafi: 'What do these Europeans think they're doing, trying to bomb and destroy the Libyan State? There's going to be floods of migrants out of Africa and jihadists into Europe', and this is exactly what happened.

I haven't traveled in Africa nearly as much as I'd like to. I've been there a few times, and I'd like to learn more about the various cultures in Africa. But that's the basis point of where all of the music that I love is based upon, from Africa to Cuba to Puerto Rico to South America.

What distinguishes [Afropolitans] is a willingness to complicate Africa – namely, to engage with, critique, and celebrate the parts of Africa that mean most to them. Perhaps what most typifies the Afropolitan consciousness is the refusal to oversimplify; the effort to understand what is ailing in Africa alongside the desire to honour what is wonderful, unique. Rather than essentialising the geographical entity, we seek to comprehend the cultural complexity; to honour the intellectual and spiritual legacy; and to sustain our parents’ cultures.

It's not fair that people ignore AIDS in Africa because it's Africa. It's not fair.

It occurred to me that if Africa needed us, sometimes we needed Africa a great deal more.

Most of the ancestors that I can trace were born here in the United States of America. And then it goes back to slavery. And I'm sure my ancestors go all the way back to Africa, but I feel more of an affinity for America than I do for Africa. I'm a black man in America.

Is not the midnight like Central Africa to most of us? Are we not tempted to explore it,--to penetrate to the shores of its Lake Tchad, and discover the source of its Nile, perchance the Mountains of the Moon? Who knows what fertility and beauty, moral and natural, are to be found? In the Mountains of the Moon, in the Central Africa of the night, there is where all Niles have their hidden heads. The expeditions up the Nile as yet extend but to the Cataracts, or perchance to the mouth of the White Nile; but it is the black Nile that concerns us.

There's the complex categorization of low warmth/high competence. This is the hostile stereotype of Asian Americans by white America, of Jews in Europe, of Indo-Pakistanis in East Africa, of Lebanese in West Africa, of ethnic Chinese in Indonesia, and of the rich by the poor most everywhere. It's the same low-high derogation: They're cold, greedy, clannish - -but, dang, they're sure good at making money and you should go to one who is a doctor if you're seriously sick.

A lot of people say colonialism was 'evil' or whatever, but what have they really done with Africa since we gave it back to them? I don't think it should be considered 'racist' to admit maybe ending apartheid did more harm than good in South Africa.

Africa's risks are mainly perceived and not real. Unfortunately for us in Africa we are not really very good at telling our own story. But things are changing and people are beginning to understand that things are going very, very well.

I'm not so Pro-Israel'I'm Pro-Africa. Africa's greatest enemy of all time is the Arab Muslim Empire'they enslaved us for one thousand years and have committed untold atrocities and genocides against the East African people.

Africa is a very special place, the people are very special there. There is a lot of love, and a lot warmth and a lot of light that is there. I think that if we aren't careful with places like Africa, in terms of the way that we set up our way of living, which now I think that most of the world operates on. If we don't focus on the steps towards creating a more peaceful structure right now, we could possibly wipe out full nations, cultures and species as as we have in the past.

I was extremely frustrated, almost at the point of giving up on coming up with a name for the project (because I'm awful at it), when I decided to play the 'put a pen somewhere on a map with your eyes closed' game with South Africa. About the 5th try was St. Lucia in South Africa, which coincidentally also happens to be an idyllic sub-tropical seaside resort town. The name seemed to fit with the mood of the music, and so after a while it just stuck.

My maternal family are South African and when I was small and my parents separated my mother and I went back to South Africa. So for me the emergence of my own childhood consciousness was in the context of 1970s and 1980s apartheid South Africa and the movement there.

Across Africa there is what I call a colonialist mentality or orthodoxy. Orthodoxy in the sense that a lot of things have gone wrong in Africa in the post-colonial period. And time and time again, any time something went wrong, the leadership claims that it was never their fault.

People are beginning to understand there is nothing in the world so remote that it can't impact you as a person. It's not just diseases. Economists are now beginning to say if we are going to have good markets in Africa, we're going to have to have healthy people in Africa.

My family has very strong women. My mother never laughed at my dream of Africa, even though everyone else did because we didn't have any money, because Africa was the 'dark continent', and because I was a girl.

I think that the feel that maybe China is slowing down means it will be buying less from Africa and Latin America. That means Procter & Gamble and Coca-Cola will sell less in Latin America and Africa. And so it is definitely related.

One of the reasons why I've written The Challenge for Africa is to save it. Surely there are so many problems we can solve in Africa, but first and foremost, we need a government that feels responsible to protect their own people from the exploitations, from the misuse, from the mistreatment that they can easily get.

People say that slaves were taken from Africa. This is not true: People were taken from Africa, among them healers and priests, and were made into slaves.

I was examining what religious identity meant in Africa. Along the edge of the Islamic world, what patterns were shaping identity? And the truth is, when I looked at the rise of violent forms of religion, no single identity was prevalent. It's central to note that in Nigeria, that tree is rooted primarily in Christianity. It's not just Islamic militants in the Middle Belt.

When you're sharing a mud hole with a wildebeest derriere in sub-Saharan Africa, that's a living hell.

As I walked out one evening, Walking down Bristol Street, The crowds upon the pavement Were fields of harvest wheat. And down by the brimming river I heard a lover sing Under an arch of the railway: 'Love has no ending. 'I'll love you, dear, I'll love you Till China and Africa meet, And the river jumps over the mountain And the salmon sing in the street, 'I'll love you till the ocean Is folded and hung up to dry And the seven stars go squawking Like geese about the sky.

In my view, Africa's real problems are cultural.

The thing about Hemingway that people forget is that all the stuff he did was at a time where people weren't traveling that much. At 19 he travels to Italy. He goes to the Spanish Civil War. He goes to China, he goes to Africa so at that time to travel that much is really incredible.

I got to Africa. I got the opportunity to go and learn, not about any animal, but chimpanzees. I was living in my dream world, the forest in Gombe National Park in Tanzania. It was Tanganyika when I began.

As far as we're concerned, there was no sporting organisation [that] should have anything to do with the sport in South Africa.

We have set out on a quest for true humanity, and somewhere on the distant horizon we can see the glittering prize. Let us march forth with courage and determination, drawing strength from our common plight and our brotherhood [and sisterhood]. In time we shall be in a position to bestow upon South Africa the greatest gift possible--a more human face

If we get agriculture right in Africa, where most of the people now are working in that sector, not only would it help boost development but we will be secure in terms of food and nutrition and then be able to move on to other areas.

African agriculture today is among, or is, the most under-capitalized in the world. Only seven percent of arable land in Africa is irrigated, compared to 40 percent in Asia.

We know more about soils of Mars than about soils of Africa

The voice of Mr Bush and the voice of Mr Blair can't decide who shall rule in Zimbabwe, who shall rule in Africa, who shall rule in Asia, who shall rule in Venezuela, who shall rule in Iran, who shall rule in Iraq.

I grew up in a farm in South Africa and I was scouted there and they sent me to Europe. It's kind of been blessed, since then it happened all so fast.

Visit to Africa reshaped my point-of-view of colonialism. It reshaped my point-of-view of my own sense of source, and my own place of birth. It made it more organic inside of me, because it placed me in a position where my job was to understand and to become more African.

There was a time when all dark-skinned people were called Ethiopians, for the Greeks referred to Africa as, 'The Land Of The Burnt-Face People.'

Without evading the grimness of life in much of modern Africa, one can recognize that this continent is not yet sick as our continent is sick. Most Africans remain plugged into reality. In contrast we have become disconnected from it, reduced to compulsively consuming units, taught to worship 'economic growth' - the ultimate unreality in a finite world.

Shadows in shadows He watches through dreams Wings black as Africa Body strong as stone Done waiting The ravens call.

Now many things are beginning to come out and it was truly a reality to me when I went to Africa, to Guinea. The little things that had been taught to me about the African people, that they were "heathens," "savages," and they were just downright stupid people. But when I got to Guinea, we were greeted by the Government of Guinea, which is Black People - and we stayed at a place that was the government building, because we were the guests of the Government.

Well, as resources inevitably disappear [in Africa], people have to make do with a lot less. You have to be much more ingenious with a lot less, and accept that you can't get your perfect tuna sandwich on a street corner.

How can you have a world of today where India is not represented in the Security Council; Japan, the second contributor, is not there; the whole continent of Africa, soon to be 54 countries, don't have a single permanent seat; and Latin America is absent? It's not realistic.

We probably have, right now, after the Civil Rights movement - and this was very unfortunate - the most glaring time of giving up on Africa, saying we're Americans. We are Americans. I'm not arguing that point. So are the Italians. So are the Germans. So are the Jews. We're Americans with an historical geography of origins outside of the United States as all people, maybe except the indigenous Americans who came here so long ago, who have generations of people whose historical origins are right here but whose initial historical origins are somewhere in Asia.

I don't know [why we're here]. People sometimes say to me, 'Why don't you admit that the humming bird, the butterfly, the Bird of Paradise are proof of the wonderful things produced by Creation?' And I always say, well, when you say that, you've also got to think of a little boy sitting on a river bank, like here, in West Africa, that's got a little worm, a living organism, in his eye and boring through the eyeball and is slowly turning him blind. The Creator God that you believe in, presumably, also made that little worm. Now I personally find that difficult to accommodate.

If you're from Africa, why are you white?

So this is why I'm always say happy that somebody mentions Rwanda, because behind Rwanda, we have Africa.

Whenever I finish a book, I go off and have some kind of adventure. Having had an adventure in my writing chair or on my writing sofa, an internal adventure, then I need to balance that off with an external adventure, so I'll go tramping through Africa or whitewater rafting or float to Hawaii in a martini shaker or something.

In Jamaica, we eradicated polio many years ago, but there are a lot of kids suffering in Africa still.