African Quotes

459 Sourced quotes

It was mid-November 2008. There were pirates taking ships with impunity in African waters, terrorists punching holes in Indian security, China sinking towards depression because Americans were afraid to buy cheap goods for Christmas, and the richest nation in the history of the world was talking about how to keep a budget.

I am an African. I owe my being to the hills and the valleys, the mountains and the glades, the rivers, the deserts, the trees, the flowers, the seas and the ever-changing seasons that define the face of our native land.

Theirs is a story of African-American strength and courage. I share it now as my parents told it to me, because their struggles and triumphs ring true today. People all over the world are still on the move, trying to build better lives for themselves and for their families.

My point is that the only authentic identity for the African is the tribe.... I am Nigerian because a white man created Nigeria and gave me that identity. I am black because the white man constructed black to be as different as possible from his white. But I was Igbo before the white man came.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Is a civilization naturally backward because it is different? Outside of cannibalism, which can be matched in this country, at least, by lynching, there is no vice and no degradation in native African customs which can begin to touch the horrors thrust upon them by white masters. Drunkenness, terrible diseases, immorality, all these things have been gifts of European civilization.

W. E. B. Du Bois

From 1949 to the present, for every dollar the US spent on an African, it spent $250.65 on an Israeli, and for every dollar it spent on someone from the Western Hemisphere outside the US, it spent $214 on an Israeli.

Colored, Negro, Afro-American, African American. Every couple of years someone came up with something that got us an inch closer to the truth. Bit by bit we crept along. As if that thing we believed to be approaching actually existed.

Colson Whitehead

Memories. form the building blocks of family history. They are the stories that survive in our kitchens and in our living rooms. Stories that tell it like it is about the way it was, the way it used to be. Some are humorous, others are painful, even embarrassing, but all of them make up the essence of African American history.

Henry Louis Gates

The colonization and exploitation of Africa and the enslavement of African people must be the biggest crime in the whole of history, and one from which we still suffer, both materially and psychologically. Yet we never had even an apology, let alone any form of compensation.

To say of the traditional African thinker that he is interested in supernatural rather than natural causes makes little more sense... than to say of the physicist that he is interested in nuclear rather than natural causes. In fact, both are making the same use of theory to transcend the limited vision of natural causes provided by common sense.

Robin W. G. Horton

He who esteems the Virginia reel A bait to draw saints from their spiritual weal, And regards the quadrille as a far greater knavery Than crushing His African children with slavery, Since all who take part in a waltz or cotillon Are mounted for hell on the devil's own pillion, Who, as every true orthodox Christian well knows, Approaches the heart through the door of the toes.

James Russell Lowell

If the Democrats have their way, African Americans will continue to feel oppressed, despised and handicapped into the indefinite future. All progress will be downplayed and every setback amplified. In this way, Democrats can continue to rely on lopsided black support at the polls.

African Americans have come too far and we have too far yet to go to take a detour into the swamp of hatred. Never let the dying hand of racism rest on your shoulder, weighing you down. Let racism always be someone else's burden to carry.

Exploitation and oppression is not a matter of race. It is the system, the apparatus of world-wide brigandage called imperialism, which made the Powers behave the way they did. I have no illusions on this score, nor do I believe that any Asian nation or African nation, in the same state of dominance, and with the same system of colonial profit-amassing and plunder, would have behaved otherwise.

The term black or African-American not only denotes race, it denotes condition, and carries with it the vestige of slavery and the social segregation and abuse of opportunity so vivid in our memory.

The negro king desired to be portrayed as white. But do not laugh at the poor African; for every man is but another negro king, and would like to appear in a color different from that with which Fate has bedaubed him.

Africa hit me all at once in those little clubs in Spanish Harlem. Got right into my marrow. I found my musical heritage, my roots there. African slaves in America were not allowed to practice their own religions or to use the drum.. The Africa they wouldn't let us have in South Carolina I discovered for myself in East Harlem.

Dizzy Gillespie

There could be no more powerful argument against mixing religion and government than the success of independent African American churches in placing racial segregation and discrimination on a reluctant nation's social agenda. Would black churches have been able to take the lead in the struggle had they been dependent on funds doled out for 'faith-based initiatives'... ?

TZETZE (or TSETSE) FLY, n. An African insect ("Glossina morsitans") whose bite is commonly regarded as nature's most efficacious remedy for insomnia, though some patients prefer that of the American novelist ("Mendax interminabilis").

There is a new dawn on the African horizon. I know this as a matter of fact that this new beginning is not a mirage. It portends a rebirth of Africa that can and must occur. It imposes an obligation on all of us to join together as midwives of Africa's Renaissance.

I've never understood people who say they're not a practicing Jew. You never hear a black guy say he's not a practicing African-American. What does it even mean?

Gilbert Gottfried

The Afrocentric exploration of the black past only scratches the surface. A full examination of the ancestry of those who are referred to in the newspapers as blacks and African Americans must include Europe and Native America.

We are digital archives of the African Pliocene, even of Devonian seas; walking repositories of wisdom out of the old days. You could spend a lifetime reading in this ancient library and die unsated by the wonder of it.

Richard Dawkins

My friend, an African river bears no resemblance to a Venetian canal. Only the strongest spirit can hold both together. Only the most powerful heart can endure the pulse of two such disparate life-forces.

Acquired characteristics cannot be inherited, and... within a species every member is born in the essential image of the first of its kind. African Genesis: A Personal Investigation into the Animal Origins and Nature of Man