Africa Quotes

Our brain is a circuit board with neurons and terminals ready to be wired. We are born free, then programmed to obey our parents, to tell the truth, pass exams, pursue and achieve, love and propagate, age and fade unfulfilled and uncertain what it has all been for. We swallow the operating system with our mother's milk and sleepwalk into the forest of consumer illusion craving shoes, houses, cars, magazines, experiences that endorse our preconceived dreams and opinions. We grow into our parents. We becomes clones, robots, matchstick men thinking and saying the same, feeling the same, behaving the same, appreciating in books and films and art shows those things we already recognize and understand.

~ Chloe Thurlow

If character is destiny, I was fated to be carried off into the desert. From the deck of the ship I had imagined my own ghost and seen my unvanishing footsteps. When you don't belong anywhere it doesn't matter where you are or where you go, if you stay or move on. You arrive at a place where the view forwards and backwards is the same, where the sun rises in the east one day and the west the next, where you stop planning and live like the birds and beasts by intuition and instinct.

~ Chloe Thurlow

The ancient paused for a moment, as if his strength were failing. Yet I sensed that there was more to tell. Looking deep into my eyes, he whispered: 'The Gond kingdoms have fallen, their people live dispersed in poverty: the teak trees and the jungles have been cleared... but the importance of the Gonds must not be forgotten!

~ Tahir Shah

Ma? I think you have the spirit of husband-repelling. You are too hard, ma, you will not find a husband. But my pastor can destroy that spirit.

~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

You will be perpetually unhappy if you continue to refuse to walk in your calling.

~ Brandi L. Bates

The doctor in Murare is old - old for anybody. He is especially old for a doctor and especially old for an African. But he doesn´t have the luxury of retirement to look forward to. There aren´t enough doctors in Africa. Those who choose to become doctors here don´t do it for the money or because thy want to do good. They do it because they have to heal, the way most people need to breath or eat or love. They can´t stop. As long as they are alive, they will never not be a doctor. They can be old, or alcoholic or burnt-out, but they will always be a doctor.

~ Alexandra Fuller

African leaders must desire to liberates it’s people through intensive education (formal and informal). The African people deserve to be educated.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

One morning, as he sat at his desk, he heard the sound of a horse's hooves on the path outside his house. He stepped out on to the verandah. There, on a tall grey horse, sat Morgane. 'I've come to have my picture painted,' she said. She took off her hat and her long black hair cascaded below her shoulders. 'You said you would,' she added, before dismounting. She wore a pair of moleskin jodhpurs and a white shirt, open at the neck. Her skin was radiant from the African sun.

~ P.b. North

...He sat back on his heels and watched the stars one by one cut their way through onrushing darkness, till all was reversed, day was night, and the blackness glittered with all the desert's sands, each a tiny flame beyond the bounds of time.

~ Mike Bond

Africa! Africa! Africa! Africa my motherland!Africa, your people cries for you!Africans must educate their citizens.Africans must reach out to it's people and empower them to build the nation.Africans you are the only people who can liberated your citizens from poverty through education. Africans must pay the price to rebuild the continent.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

I've seen poverty & I can assure you that it's 'too dark' (Black) in colour.

~ Cedric Namedi Mathuthe

You know you are truly alive when you’re living among lions.

~ Karen Blixen

…it was even more disconcerting to examine your charts before a proposed flight only to find that in many cases the bulk of the terrain over which you had to fly was bluntly marked: ‘UNSURVEYED.’ It was as if the mapmakers had said, ‘We are aware that between this spot and that one, there are several hundred thousands of acres, but until you make a forced landing there, we won’t know whether it is mud, desert, or jungle – and the chances are we won’t know then!

~ Beryl Markham

To lovers of adventure and novelty, Africa displays a most ample field.

~ James Rennell

They were the men and the women of the sand, of the wind, of the light, of the night. They appeared as in a dream, at the crest of a dune, as if they were born of the cloudless sky.

~ Jean-Marie G. Le Clézio

He pondered long over this, for might not another man, returning to another valley, have found none of these things? Why was it given to one man to have his pain transmuted into gladness? Why was it given to one man to have such an awareness of God?

~ Alan Paton

We cannot change the past, she thought. How we long to sometimes, trying to work out how horror might have been averted by a fluke of fortune, a kind intercession, wisdom not yet granted.

~ Anne M. Chappel

Never complete. Never whole.White skin and an African soul.

~ Michelle Frost

There is language going on out there- the language of the wild. Roars, snorts, trumpets, squeals, whoops, and chirps all have meaning derived over eons of expression... We have yet to become fluent in the language -and music- of the wild.

~ Boyd Norton

I see that the culture that is prevalent right now in Nigeria and indeed Africa is the culture of GET RICH QUICK.

~ Sunday Adelaja

Culture is the celebration of diversity. Let us therefore not deny our origin; but instead celebrate ours as a cultural mosaic not a tower of Babel , but a power of Babel

~ Ali A. Mazrui

They glided out of the heat-haze on their camels like specters. There were twenty of them, and they were Tuareg. Their faces were hidden by black veils that left only slits for the eyes, and they wore purple robes that fluttered in the desert wind. They carried swords, muskets and seven-foot iron spears, and wore stilettos in sheaths on their left forearms. They were an impressive, sinister sight.

~ Michael Asher

Humanity's moral conscience progresses, slowly yet surely...

~ Cheikh Anta Diop

Her task seemed ridiculous, the result of a momentary weakness, of believing in the impossible, that stories have a trajectory where we find things out, resolve things to our satisfaction and come out the other side, wiser and happier

~ Anne M. Chappel

If we in Nigeria and Africa generally are to experience a true national transformation, there must be numerous movements championing the cause for truth and honesty in every aspect of our daily affairs.

~ Sunday Adelaja

Malnutrition can be as common in poverty as in wealth, one for the lack of food, the other for the lack of knowledge of food.

~ T.k. Naliaka

We look up to see if it is day or night. If stars burn cool and moon does shine, We take to smoke divine and wine.If breath of sun does belch its heat,we boil coffee and prepare to eat.

~ Roman Payne

We know that there are many animals on this continent not found in the Old World. These must have been carried from here to the ark, and then brought back afterwards. Were the peccary, armadillo, ant-eater, sloth, agouti, vampire-bat, marmoset, howling and prehensile-tailed monkey, the raccoon and muskrat carried by the angels from America to Asia? How did they get there? Did the polar bear leave his field of ice and journey toward the tropics? How did he know where the ark was? Did the kangaroo swim or jump from Australia to Asia? Did the giraffe, hippopotamus, antelope and orang-outang journey from Africa in search of the ark? Can absurdities go farther than this?

~ Robert G. Ingersoll

To the same degree that your understanding of and attitude towards Afrika becomes more positive, your understanding of and attitude towards yourself will also becomes more positive...

~ Malcolm X

I have forsaken her for a place I will never belong, but will always remain under her spell, forever to be, a child of my motherland.

~ B.g. Bowers

Sentiments that glorify humanity know no racial distinction.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Call up the ever-pure, the effulgent and the ever-radiant character of true humanism in yourself and in others, and no racism shall have the power to thrive in such society even for a few seconds.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Tolstoy was a Caucasian, Gandhi was an Asian, and Martin Luther King Jr. was a Negro, yet all of their hearts were inspired by the one idea of nonviolent resistance. King received it from Gandhi, Gandhi received it from Tolstoy, and Tolstoy received it from Christ.

~ Abhijit Naskar

It is character that should be the sole measure of judgement in the society of thinking humanity, and nothing short of that would do.

~ Abhijit Naskar

If not as a true human, let me tell you as a Biologist, color of the skin does not define an individual’s intelligence – it does not define an individual’s ambitions - it does not define an individual’s dreams – and above all, it does not define an individual’s character.

~ Abhijit Naskar

In the biological sense, race does not exist.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Character is a choice whatever the circumstance; In the NRM you can choose to be a Hon. Ruhakana Rugunda, an Ofwono Opondo or a Tamale Mirundi. And in the Opposition you can choose to be a Gen. Mugisha Muntu, a Munyagwa or a Kato Lubwama.

~ Allan Amanyire

One of the unsettling things about my journey, mentally, physically, and emotionally, was that I wasn’t sure when or where it was going to end. I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life. I felt that I was starting over and over again. I was always on the move, always going somewhere. While we walked, I sometimes lagged behind, thinking about these things. To survive each passing day was my goal in life. At villages where we managed to find some happiness by being treated to food or fresh water, I knew that it was temporary and that we were only passing through. So I couldn’t bring myself to be completely happy. It was much easier to be sad than to go back and forth between emotions, and this gave me the determination I needed to keep moving. I was never disappointed, since I always expected the worst to happen. There were nights when I couldn’t sleep but stared into the darkest night until my eyes could see clearly through it. I thought about where my family was and whether they were alive.

~ Ishmael Beah

When considering grand plans for effective communicable disease control in this time of Ebola peril, malaria continues to kill nearly a million people a year world-wide, and by far the single most reliable protection against malaria is to sleep under a mosquito net, but one of the major impediments to this basic and effective malaria control is that many people, regardless of education level or country of origin, in malaria endemic zones don't install and use one, not that they can't get one, but because they don't think the mosquito net 'looks nice.

~ T.k. Naliaka

Black(people) hold onto their God just as the drunken man holds on to the street lamp post—for physical support only.

~ Tai Solarin