I thought ‘Out of Africa’ would be a beautiful ballet.

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,...

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

I admire the Stanley Cup. I’ll bet winning it could provide enough clean water for half of Africa (the middle half).

No nation has ever been able to transform by chance. Its always a deliberate and conscious process

Ils étaient les hommes et les femmes du sable, du vent, de la lumière, de la nuit. Ils étaient apparus, comme dans un rêve, en haut d’une dune, comme s’ils étaient nés du ciel sans...

New York! I say New York, let black blood flow into your blood.Let it wash the rust from your steel joints, like an oil of life Let it give your bridges the curve of hips...

Do the little things. In the future when you look back, they’d have made the greatest change.

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...

Poetic words are usually more stimulating than accurate. Taking them too seriously is a mistake.

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...

But in Africa bureaucrats are usually too proud to accept a bribe, something I admire when I’m not the one being arrested.

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...

Take your place, then. Look at what happened from every side and consider all the other ways it could have gone. Consider, even, an Africa unconquered altogether. Imagine those first Portuguese adventurers approaching the shore,...

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.

It’s become relatively commonplace to find corners of Africa that have good cell coverage but no electrical power.

Youths are our arrows to the future.

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.

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.

Les personnages de nos autres vies sont des fantômes que la littérature fait revivre.

This stupidity of sounding a siren and speeding through traffic with a coffin must be an African speciality.

The key trait of a Sperm Pirate is that she is not driven by desperation. Escaping poverty or hardship is not her motive. She usually has a good education and access to the same opportunities...

Professor Khupe rubbed his hand along the sand dunes of her windswept form. The static charge made her skin feel like the surface of a cactus. He recoiled. How he wished he had gone into...

Shovels aren’t very glamorous, but they’ve been liberating entire communities from malaria for the past 5,000 years.

No body wishes more than I do to see such proofs as you exhibit, that nature has given to our black brethren, talents equal to those of the other colors of men, and that the...

Nous avons accepté la règle du jeu, le jeu nous forme à son image. Le Sahara, c’est en nous qu’il se montre. L’aborder ce n’est point visiter l’oasis, c’est faire notre religion d’une fontaine.

The schools wear the blank faces of war buildings, their windows blown blind by rocks or guns or mortars. Their plaster is an acne of bullet marks. The huts and small houses crouch open and...

Hapana! Murphy yupo! Ni mfanyabiashara maarufu huko Tanzania. Lakini ndiyo hivyo kama unavyosema … Haonekani!

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...

Fletcher has gone to South Africa to drop his wife who is sick.

Schools kill time and creativity. Find ways to workaround these limitations

It is a tragedy, at rate at which EBOLA VIRUS is spreading in West Africa. It is a fatal disease in the history of the world. Intensive education (formal and informal approaches) of the citizens...

In her orchard the trees had been born from deaths; they marked and grew from the remains of the children that had passed through her.

Some people talk of Africa being a continent cursed not blessed with minerals, but the real curse is the leaders and politicians of Africa

In Panama, I found a spider that eats its own limbs during lean times. I am told they grow back. But though the distinction is razor-thin, desperation is not the same thing as determination. Nevertheless,...

… walk in the footprints of his ancestors. This land is a museum of man’s ancient history. The American has gone to the moon and found dust, he’s going farther away to look for other...

If one could speak two languages well and was raised on tea and baguettes for breakfast,in places where the most mundane daily business on the street is conducted in four languages, where horse carts park...

When sin ceases to pay, we have a happy knack of finding out that it is wrong; so after a bit, when Virginia, and Georgia and the Carolinas had ceased to belong to us, we...

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.

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: ‘UNSURVEYED.’It was...

Africa has more dictators per capita than any other continent.

The boxer had two black eyes. But that’s to be expected, since he was from Africa.

Many people read History books but it takes just a few people to LEAD the cause that will shape the course of HISTORY.

This week, Zuma was quoted as saying, ‘When the British came to our country, they said everything we are doing was barbaric, was wrong, inferior in whatever way.’ But the serious critique of Zuma is...

Our cultural roots are the most ancient in the world. The spiritual concepts of our Ancestors gave birth to religious thought African people believe in the oneness of the African family through sacred time, which...

It is a shame that the very people who used education to clamber out of the disadvantages they had grown up in, have drawn up the ladder after them.

Our fathers fought bravely. But do you know the biggest weapon unleashed by the enemy against them? It was not the Maxim gun. It was division among them. Why? Because a people united in faith...

Every successful mission requires a clear plan. Tonight, Mrs. Sibanda’s mission was to enjoy some gratification. She would not be denied. Her plan was as clear as oxygen. It involved an expensive perfume, a bottle...

I want to defend Ben Bella just as I am going to defend Boumedienne. Ben Bella was not the ‘demon’ that the nervous, demagogic communique of 19 June accused him of being, no more than...

She asked another question: “What does it matter if the rhinos die out? Is it really important that they are saved?”This would normally have riled me… but I had comes to think of her as...