Quotes from Giles Foden

Ordinary Kenyans rightly want to be able to shop safely, and there is a long history of them doing just that, irrespective of their religion or that of the shop owner.

Foreign students add cultural value to their British peers, who need an international outlook.

At school, I got into the whole CB thing, hiding a transceiver in my study-bedroom with which I'd make appointments to meet girls in town. I wasn't good enough at physics to take it much further than fun, but I suppose there was a need to communicate.

Detective fiction could not have existed without Edgar Allan Poe.

To realise belatedly that there are Swahili epic poems which rival their European equivalents for sweep and power has been exciting.

The search for inventive ways of telling the tale of Christ's birth has been going on a long time; in a way, difference was there from the start with Luke and Matthew.

Since its beginnings, American writing has been in dialogue with other literatures.

In Kenya, crime and terrorism are deeply linked, not least by the failure of successive Kenyan governments to control either.

Writers such as Richard Powers and the late David Foster Wallace have shown the path to a newer generation of writers for whom all national boundaries are quaint curiosities.

The forgiveness that comes of patient interpretation seems impossible when those nearest to your heart are threatened.

I spent my childhood tinkering with electronic circuits, on breadboards, as they used to be called, in particular making radio transmitters.

My father worked in agriculture, and I got to travel round remote rural areas with him and see a bit of the landscape and people.

Writing about Africa by Africans has been part of my literary apprenticeship, standing alongside works by authors such as Joseph Conrad, Joyce Cary and Graham Greene as influences.

It's the swirling river of time that makes our identities, not the monochromatic simplicity of skin colour or the definitive lines of international borders.

You can gesture at the transnational problem of Islamist terrorism all you like, but it's just hot air unless you invest in proper security on the ground in your own country, with the right safeguards to civil liberties.

Suffering produces a recursion to the tribe, to one's own kind. When a lot of people suffer, tribes lose their head.

My father was an agricultural economist. In 1989 he was posted to Mbarara, a small town on the Uganda-Rwanda border.

The history of ideas is littered with the corpses of those who have tried to define culture.

From 1971 to 1993, my family lived in a number of African countries, including Malawi, Tanzania, Ethiopia and Nigeria, as well as Uganda itself.

I grew up in the African bush in Malawi, Tanzania and Uganda, which is my thing. I love the smell of the dust as you bump along in a Land-Rover. I go back there often.

la kuvunda halian ubani. There is no incense for something rotting. And that is the condition of the world. This I know.

there is a tendency in Africa that it does not matter if an African kills other Africans. Had Amin been white, free Africa would have passed many resolutions condemning him. Being black is now becoming a certificate to kill fellow Africans.

They thought it was an enemy but it was only their own reflection.

the cause—that is the place where we cannot go.