Africa Quotes

Wife number one always married with the naïve romantic dream that her husband would never need another wife, believing his earnest promises to her that she would be the only one, that their marriage was different… until he shattered her union with him and obliterated her dignity by bringing the next woman home. Her children would learn from her embittered and broken heart that their father had betrayed her and thus, by extension… them. They themselves would count the other wives and their half-siblings as interlopers, cutting into their rightful inheritance, long before they were old enough to be sent to learn anything from their sire.

~ T.k. Naliaka

Already this sun was pouring its wrath into the blue Indian ocean where swordfish and marlin cruised like silver-blue attenuated warheads in their green-gold depths...

~ Mike Bond

For every drop of water you waste, you must know that somewhere on earth someone is desperately looking for a drop of water!

~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

I have seen Ikpea too. Ikpea is not dead, he is in the evil forest with Amende… Pg.70

~ Obehi Peter Ewanfoh

The press can’t do shit about corruption in Africa without the masses. Everybody knows the offices that ask for bribes and everybody continues to pay. So reporting an incident of corruption in the media is like announcing that the sun rises in the morning.

~ Dauglas Dauglas

The eastern savanna shifted from charcoal to deep purple, to the west a feverish orange moon sank into the Kiambu Hills.

~ Mike Bond

Violence is itself a form of political mobilisation. It is mainly directed against civilians and not at another army. The aim is to capture territory through political control rather than through military success. And political control is maintained through terror, through expulsion or elimination of those who challenge political control, especially those with a different label. Population displacement, massacres, widespread atrocities are not just side effects of war; they are a deliberate strategy for political control. The tactic is to sow the fear and hate on which exclusive identity claims rest.

~ Leon Kukkuk

The end of superpower patronage to client movements worldwide created a power vacuum whose inevitable results included the spread of violence and the emergence of disparate groups, ostensibly fighting in the name of ideology, religion or ethnicity, but now seeking their finance through local taxes, plunder and pillage.

~ Leon Kukkuk

Those who want rain, must also accept the mud.

~ Anonymous

Africa must remain on the path of democracy. But democracy MUST also remain about the PEOPLE, not about power

~ Fela Durotoye

As the seemingly well-intentioned French journalist spoke about Africa’s scarcity and its limited resources, Nine smiled to himself almost condescendingly. He considered such statements an absolute joke. Africa did not, nor did it ever have, limited resources.Nine knew something the journalist obviously didn’t: Africa was the most abundantly resourced continent on the planet bar none. Like the despots who ruled much of the region, and the foreign governments who propped them up, he knew there was more than enough wealth in Africa’s mineral resources such as gold, diamonds and oil – not to mention the land that nurtured these resources – for every man, woman and child. He thought it unfortunate Africa had never been able to compete on a level playing field. The continent’s almost unlimited resources were the very reason foreigners had meddled in African affairs for the past century or more. Nine knew it was Omega’s plan, and that of other greedy organizations, to siphon as much wealth as they could out of vulnerable Third World countries, especially in Africa. The same organizations had the formula down pat: they indirectly started civil wars in mineral-rich regions by providing arms to opposing local factions, and sometimes even helped to create famines, in order to destabilize African countries. This made the targeted countries highly vulnerable to international control. Once the outside organizations had divided and conquered, they were then able to plunder the country’s resources.

~ James Morcan

Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that's the inheritor of our fear. Let him not love the earth too deeply. Let him not laugh too gladly when the water runs through his fingers, nor stand too silent when the setting sun makes red the veld with fire. Let him not be too moved when the birds of his land are singing. Nor give too much of his heart to a mountain or a valley. For fear will rob him if he gives too much.

~ Alan Paton

I feel as though the cardboard box of my own reality has been flattened and blown open. Now I can see the edge of the world.

~ Tom Hiddleston

No other continent has endured such an unspeakably bizarre combination of foreign thievery and foreign goodwill.

~ Barbara Kingsolver

I've never really wanted to go to Japan. Simply because I don’t like eating fish. And I know that's very popular out there in Africa.

~ Britney Spears

We pull on to the road, where our only company are the wandering cattle, who have become commonplace as traffic lights. Lethargic and listless, they look like they've been roaming the roads of Guinea since the dawn of time. And no doubt they will continue to long after we're gone.

~ Tom Hiddleston

Except for the sound of the rain, on the road, on the roofs, on the umbrella, there was absolute silence: only the dying moan of the sirens continued for a moment or two to vibrate within the ear. It seemed to Scobie later that this was the ultimate border he had reached in happiness: being in darkness, alone, with the rain falling, without love or pity.

~ Graham Greene

I feel to that the gap between my new life in New York and the situation at home in Africa is stretching into a gulf, as Zimbabwe spirals downwards into a violent dictatorship. My head bulges with the effort to contain both worlds. When I am back in New York, Africa immediately seems fantastical – a wildly plumaged bird, as exotic as it is unlikely.Most of us struggle in life to maintain the illusion of control, but in Africa that illusion is almost impossible to maintain. I always have the sense there that there is no equilibrium, that everything perpetually teeters on the brink of some dramatic change, that society constantly stands poised for some spasm, some tsunami in which you can do nothing but hope to bob up to the surface and not be sucked out into a dark and hungry sea. The origin of my permanent sense of unease, my general foreboding, is probably the fact that I have lived through just such change, such a sudden and violent upending of value systems.In my part of Africa, death is never far away. With more Zimbabweans dying in their early thirties now, mortality has a seat at every table. The urgent, tugging winds themselves seem to whisper the message, memento mori, you too shall die. In Africa, you do not view death from the auditorium of life, as a spectator, but from the edge of the stage, waiting only for your cue. You feel perishable, temporary, transient. You feel mortal. Maybe that is why you seem to live more vividly in Africa. The drama of life there is amplified by its constant proximity to death. That’s what infuses it with tension. It is the essence of its tragedy too. People love harder there. Love is the way that life forgets that it is terminal. Love is life’s alibi in the face of death. For me, the illusion of control is much easier to maintain in England or America. In this temperate world, I feel more secure, as if change will only happen incrementally, in manageable, finely calibrated, bite-sized portions. There is a sense of continuity threaded through it all: the anchor of history, the tangible presence of antiquity, of buildings, of institutions. You live in the expectation of reaching old age.At least you used to.But on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, those two states of mind converge. Suddenly it feels like I am back in Africa, where things can be taken away from you at random, in a single violent stroke, as quick as the whip of a snake’s head. Where tumult is raised with an abruptness that is as breathtaking as the violence itself.

~ Peter Godwin

The continent is too large to describe. It is a veritable ocean, a separate planet, a varied, immensely rich cosmos. Only with the greatest simplification, for the sake of convenience, can we say 'Africa'. In reality, except as a geographical appellation, Africa does not exist.

~ Ryszard Kapuściński

My African roots made me what I am today. They’re the reason I’m from the Dominican Republic. They’re the reason I exist at all. To these roots I owe everything.

~ Junot Díaz

It is almost impossible to overemphasize the importance with which ancestry is held in the Middle East and North Africa.

~ Tahir Shah

Africans must change their mind and actions.The keys to building your continent depends on your will-power, persistent effort and action towards self liberation.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Everybody looks at oil and almost entirely forget that the percentage of jobs the oil sector creates is relatively small compared to the population; the introduction of more sophisticated exploration methods makes it even worse. Oil companies now look for smarter, leaner and cheaper operations. Where will these leave the economy? Good disposable income to the government with no real value to the people of the Niger Delta.

~ Emi Iyalla

Have you a room that you could let?Yes, I have a room that I could let, but I do not want to let it. I have only two rooms, and there are six of us already, and the boys and girls are growing up. But school books cost money, and my husband is ailing, and when he is well it is only thirty-five shillings a week. And six shillings of that is for the rent, and three shillings of that is for the rent, and three shillings for travelling, and a shilling that we may all be buried decently, and a shilling for the books, and three shillings is for clothes and that is little enough, and a shilling for my husband's beer, and a shilling for his tobacco, and these I do not grudge for he is a decent man and does not gamble or spend his money on other women, and a shilling for the Church, and a shilling for sickness. And that leaves seventeen shillings for food for six, and we are always hungry. Yes I have a room but I do not want to let it. How much could you pay?I could pay three shillings a week for the room.And I would not take it.Three shillings and sixpence.Three shillings and sixpence. You can't fill your stomach on privacy. You need privacy when your children are growing up, but you can't fill your stomach on it. Yes, I shall take three shillings and sixpence.

~ Alan Paton

When people have tried everything and have discovered that nothing works, they will tend to revert to what they know best—which will often be the tribe, the totem, or the taboo.

~ Christopher Hitchens

There are as many Africas as there are books about Africa -- and as many books about it as you could read in a leisurely lifetime. Whoever writes a new one can afford a certain complacency in the knowledge that his is a new picture agreeing with no one else's, but likely to be haugthily disagreed with by all those who believed in some other Africa. ... Being thus all things to all authors, it follows, I suppose, that Africa must be all things to all readers.Africa is mystic; it is wild; it is a sweltering inferno; it is a photographer's paradise, a hunter's Valhalla, an escapist's Utopia. It is what you will, and it withstands all interpretations. It is the last vestige of a dead world or the cradle of a shiny new one. To a lot of people, as to myself, it is just 'home.

~ Beryl Markham

What a child does not know and does not want to know of race and colour and class, he learns soon enough as he grows to see each man flipped inexorably into some predestined groove like a penny or a sovereign in a banker's rack. Kibii, the Nandi boy, was my good friend. Arab Ruta (the same boy grown to manhood), who sits before me, is my good friend, but the handclasp will be shorter, the smile will not be so eager on his lips, and though the path is for a while the same, he will walk behind me now, when once, in the simplicity of our nonage, we walked together.

~ Beryl Markham

When traveling in rural Africa, it's important to not actually *go* to a hospital until the patient is on the brink of expiration, otherwise things are apt to get worse.

~ Josh Gates

A charging black rhinoceros is nothing to mess with. When it is headed straight toward you, it is the ultimate exercise in sphincter control. In my case, it was a strange bit of weather that caused one to charge me.

~ Boyd Norton

It seemed that the printers of the African maps had a slightly malicious habit of including, in large letters, the names of towns, junctions, and villages which, while most of them did exist in fact, as a group of thatched huts may exist or a water hole, they were usually so inconsequential as completely to escape discovery from the cockpit.

~ Beryl Markham

At most, a hundred paces separated him from them. The powerful beast, seeing the riders and horses, rose on his fore paws and began to gaze at them. The sun, which now stood low, illuminated his huge head and shaggy breasts, and in that ruddy luster he was like one of those sphinxes which ornament the entrances to ancient Egyptian temples.

~ Henryk Sienkiewicz

The shots had dispersed the birds; there remained only two marabous, standing between ten and twenty paces away and plunged in reverie. They were like two old men with bald heads pressed between the shoulders.

~ Henryk Sienkiewicz

Everything, all those great things, had happened so far away--or so it seemed to [Mma Ramotswe] at the time. The world was made to sound as if it belonged to other people--to those who lived in distant countries that were so different from Botswana; that was before people had learned to assert that the world was theirs too, that what happened in Botswana was every bit as important, and valuable, as what happened anywhere else.

~ Alexander Mccall Smith

It was ... 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: 'UNSURV

~ Beryl Markham

The resources of Africa are greater than the amount of aid it can ever get. Hence, Africa needs to manage its resources prudently and efficiently to minimise its dependence on aid.

~ Benjamin Kofi Quansah

Moer and more he is convinced that English is an unfit medium for the truth in South Africa.

~ J.m. Coetzee

If we act in clean way, we shall clear the city of any dirt.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

In six harrowing weeks of travel I felt I had touched the heart of Africa and found it broken.

~ Tim Butcher

The future of wildlife and the habitat that they depend on is being destroyed. It is time to make nature and all the beauty living within it our priority.

~ Paul Oxton

No one in the world needs a Rhino horn but a Rhino.

~ Paul Oxton