Quotes About Africa

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.

Music in Africa often contains messages. Music in Senegal, and Africa, is never music for music's sake or solely for entertainment. It's always a vehicle for social connections, discussions and ideas.

A number of African countries came to us and said, we request that South Africa should not field a candidate, because so many other African countries wanted to, and, in any case, South Africa would continue to play a role in terms of building the African Union, and so on. And they actually said, please don't field a candidate, and we didn't. As I have said, it is not because we didn't have people who are competent to serve in these positions.

Africa is not just about where you are born. For me, Africa is the whole continent; from south to north, to east to west.

The white man is not indigenous to Africa. Africa is for Africans. Zimbabwe is for Zimbabweans.

If you think about the last 50 years, Africa's proximity and historical context has absolutely been with Europe and the United States, but their approach in dealing with the economic challenges that Africa faces in particular has been one of handing out aid, not developing economies, not building a long term relationship around agriculture and so on.

There's a wonderful author named Can Themba, who said that Africa extends a fraternal handshake to Shakespeare. That William Shakespeare would have recognized Elizabethan England more readily in Africa today than in England today.

South Africa's increasingly, for example, the largest foreign investor in various other parts of Africa.

In Africa, you cannot come into a comfortable material lifestyle without going through Christ. So many Africans say, "I'll take the whole package. That way I'm sure I'll get what I want." This is the compromise the rising urban class of Africa makes. Christianity is not seen as a soul-transforming device capable of producing redemption, but as a source of substantial material gratification.

The West exploited Africa and now it wants to save it. We have been living with this hypocrisy for too long. Africa can only be saved by Africans.

I was treated much better in Africa than I was treated in America. And you see, often I get letters like this: "Go back to Africa."

We spent a lot of time talking about Africa, as we should. Africa is a nation that suffers from incredible disease.

There's so much stigma around HIV/AIDS. It's a challenging issue, and the people that already have been tested and know their status find it very, very hard to disclose their status, to live with that virus, and to even seek out the kind of information they need. This experience of going to South Africa a decade ago really woke me up to the scale of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in sub-Saharan Africa, how it was affecting women and their children. I haven't been able to walk away from it.

I was raised in a spirit of the importance of service to your fellow man. My mom is a senator back home in South Africa. My father is a very caring and generous individual.

Africa has a genious for extremes, for the beginning and the end. It seems simultaneously connected to some memory of Eden and to some foretaste of apocalypse. Nowhere is day more vivid or night darker. Nowhere are forests more luxuriant. Nowhere is there a continent more miserable

We're very prepared: Infection-control people in hospitals over the past two months have been reviewing all their infection- control procedures because we anticipated just this sort of thing happening-a person coming from West Africa, they were healthy at the time they traveled, but got sick here.

No child in Africa, and in fact anywhere in the world, should be denied education.

People have been tolerating their insane political system, in exchange for the countless privileges they are getting from their countries' plundering of the planet, and violating entire nations and continents. But in Africa, Asia and elsewhere, those "un-people" have no choice at all.

In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should 'have his head examined,' as General MacArthur so delicately put it.

Africa north of the Sahara, from a zoological point of view, is now, and has been since early Tertiary times, a part of Europe. This is true both of animals and of the races of man.

People talk of the sacrifice I have made in spending so much of my life in Africa. Can that be called a sacrifice which is simply paid back as a small part of a great debt owing to our God, which we can never repay? All these are nothing when compared with the glory which shall be revealed in and for us. I never made a sacrifice.

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.

If China's expansion into Africa and Russia's into Latin America and the former Soviet Union are any indication, Silicon Valley's ability to expand globally will be severely limited, if only because Beijing and Moscow have no qualms about blending politics and business.

Maybe he's been in Africa so long he has forgotten that we Christians have our own system of marriage, and it is called Monotony.

Using trees as a symbol of peace is in keeping with a widespread African tradition. For example, the elders of the Kikuyu carried a staff from the thigi tree that, when placed between two disputing sides, caused them to stop fighting and seek reconciliation. Many communities in Africa have these traditions.

The biggest lesson from Africa was that life's joys come mostly from relationships and friendships, not from material things. I saw time and again how much fun Africans had with their families and friends and on the sports fields. they laughed all the time.

Culture constitutes an essential element of social and political liberation. As people rise up across the Middle East and North Africa, the diversity of their cultures is not only the means but also the ultimate goal of their liberation and their freedom.

In 1989, thirteen nations comprising 1,695,000 people experienced nonviolent revolutions that succeeded beyond anyone's wildest expectations . . . If we add all the countries touched by major nonviolent actions in our century (the Philippines, South Africa . . . the independence movement in India . . .) the figure reaches 3,337,400,000, a staggering 65% of humanity! All this in the teeth of the assertion, endlessly repeated, that nonviolence doesn't work in the 'real' world.

When making your ass, always draw the shape of Africa. Or as Latrice would say, the homeland.

What do you want with these special Jewish pains? I feel as close to the wretched victims of the rubber plantations in Putamayo and the blacks of Africa with whose bodies the Europeans play ball… I have no special corner in my heart for the ghetto: I am at home in the entire world, where there are clouds and birds and human tears.

There are as many Africas as there are books about Africa.

When I was 10 I went to the Drakensberg Boys Choir School, which is this idyllic Harry Potter-esque music boarding school in the mountains in South Africa, and that's when everything started to change for me and I realised that music is my thing.

Skills are expensive in Africa, best people are on American salaries.

My father was champion of North Africa and he beat the European champ. He was very good, a professional for 12 years. We're from a big family of boxers. My father has seven brothers.

I first travelled to Africa at the end of 1996 and was immediately captivated. I had planned on a three-week trip, and I ended up staying two months.

When people think about this religion, they'll say "voodoo" this and "voodoo" that in the way the Hollywood movies show it: the sticking of pins in dolls. It's very different than Vodou - which is a religion that comes to Haiti from our ancestors in Africa. I want to differentiate it from the stereotypical, sensationalized view that we see of the religion.

Africa has her mouth on Moses.

I'm very familiar with poverty. I find it easy to be with, whether I'm in America or in Africa or in Asia. Wherever I go and find the environment of those who are living in poverty and resisting poverty is a great in which I have great comfort.

There is a reason why Nelson Mandela went to Cuba to praise Castro and thank the Cuban people almost as soon as he got out of jail. That's a third world reaction and they understand it. Cuba played an enormous role in the liberation of Africa and the overthrow of Apartheid, sending doctors and teachers to the poorest places in the world, to Haiti, to Pakistan after the earthquake, almost everywhere. The internationalism is just astonishing. I don't think there has been anything like it in history.

There are designers there, we have to think of production, but I am not changing Africa. But if we all do something together....We have to know our limits, I don't have the pretense I can change the world. And I don't want to set up events [to raise money]. Because what happens if the following year they don't have an event, they won't eat?

It's completely different, for instance, to report on poor farmers in Africa than it is to report on, say, poor African-Americans. The familiarity of my readers with the terrain, and their preconceptions, are quite different in those two cases, and their perspective, as I imagine it, has to be taken into account at every turn.

Do you know what the largest single cause of death in South Africa is? The largest single cause of death is what in the medical statistics is called external causes and that is violence in the society. For instance I've seen figures that say that if you take the male age cohort from16 to 45 years, 54% of the people who die in that age cohort die from external causes.

Imagine - four years you could have spent travelling around Europe meeting people, or going to the Far East of Africa or India, meeting people, exchanging ideas, reading all you wanted to anyway, and instead I wasted it at Roosevelt.

You can’t hate the roots of the tree without ending up hating the tree. You can’t hate your origin without ending up hating yourself. You can’t hate the land, your motherland, the place that you come from, and we can’t hate Africa without ending up hating ourselves. The Black man in the Western Hemisphere—North America, Central America, South America, and in the Caribbean—is the best example of how one can be made, skillfully, to hate himself that you can find anywhere on this earth.

Personally, I regard myself as an intellectual 'rebel,' kicking against the 'old colonialism-imperialism paradigm' which has landed Africa in a conundrum.

There are, of course, all sorts of other unpleasant regimes outside the walls as well - the military dictators of Latin America and the apartheid regime of South Africa.

Zamajobe is great. She's a terrific singer from South Africa.

I'm sure the government of Qatar is not coming in to grow food for the people of Kenya; it's coming to grow food to sell. If it can also sell to the people of Kenya, well, then good. I think that the moves can be helpful, but I think that the history that Africa knows, as I say in my book, has been a history of exploitation.