Quotes About Africa

Henry Morton Stanley

about 80 percent of the entire land area of Africa was still under indigenous rulers.

BOTH IN Africa and Europe, Leopold's death had promised to mark the end of an era. Many Belgians felt relieved; at last they would be rid of the multiple embarrassments of his youthful mistress, his unseemly quarrels with his daughters, and the sheer nakedness of his greed. But it was soon clear that Leopold's ghost would not vanish so easily. The king who had died while in possession of one of Europe's largest fortunes had tried to take it with him.

those who made the greatest fortunes from the Scramble for Africa, like Leopold, were often men who had fortunes to begin with.

During and after the war, though, no one in the Allied countries wanted to be reminded that, only a decade or two earlier, it was the King of the Belgians whose men in Africa had cut off hands. And

Roughly one of every four slaves imported to work the cotton and tobacco plantations of the American South began his or her journey across the Atlantic from equatorial Africa, including the Kongo kingdom.

By the end of the 1500s, other European countries had joined in the slave trade: English, French, and Dutch vessels roamed the African coast, looking for human cargo. In 1665, the army of the weakened Kingdom of the Kongo fought a battle with the Portuguese. It was defeated, and the ManiKongo was beheaded. Internal strife further depleted the kingdom, whose territory was all taken over by European colonies by the late 1800s.

Nonetheless, from Edinburgh to Rome, indignant books and speeches and sermons denounced the vicious "Arab" slavers—and with them, by implication, the idea that any part of Africa might be colonized by someone other than Europeans.

remembering how the United States and Europe have protected their investments by supporting rapacious African dictators like Mobutu, we must speak of neocolonialism as well. But

Underlying much of Europe's excitement was the hope that Africa would be a source of raw materials to feed the Industrial Revolution, just as the search for raw materials—slaves—for the colonial plantation economy had driven most of Europe's earlier dealings with Africa. Expectations quickened dramatically after prospectors discovered diamonds in South Africa in 1867 and gold some two decades later.

the idea of independence and self-government in Africa was voiced by almost no one, except for a few beleaguered rebels deep in the Congo rain forest. In

Filled with self-pity and calling himself "a man who had given up his life for his country and for Africa," he

From the colonial era, the major legacy Europe left to Africa was not democracy as it is practiced today in countries like England, France, and Belgium; it was authoritarian rule and plunder.

do not understand Englishmen at all," Stanley wrote. "Either they suspect me of some self-interest, or they do not believe me. . . . For the relief of Livingstone I was called an impostor; for the crossing of Africa I was called a pirate." Nor was there enthusiasm in the United States for Congo colonization. James Gordon Bennett, Jr., in New York, now wanted to send Stanley off in search of the North Pole.

But those who made the greatest fortunes from the Scramble for Africa, like Leopold, were often men who had fortunes to begin with.

Of the riches Leopold hoped to find in the Congo, the one that gleamed most brightly in his imagination was ivory.

SR: We are talking of a world war. AQ: And that makes you sweat, son? SR: Heavens, man! Doesn't it you? AQ: This is Africa, dear boy. Sweating is what we do. ~Alan Quartermain and Sanderson Reed

When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said 'Let us pray.' We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.

There was no way that I could explain to dogs, friends, or parents my compelling need to return to Africa to launch a long-term study of the gorillas. Some may call it destiny and others may call it dismaying. I call the sudden turn of events in my life fortuitous.

I am on my way to Ghana tomorrow morning and you just need to know that this Administration is very focused on doing all we can to promote economic development in this part of the world, in Africa, throughout Africa, North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa.

The final hour of colonialism has struck, and millions of inhabitants of Africa, Asia and Latin America rise to meet a new life and demand their unrestricted right to self-determination.

A soul was like a worm in an apple, my mother told me. Sometimes you went your whole life without knowing you had one and then suddenly it appeared. In Africa, the soul has the same shape as the body but cannot be seen. At night, it travels through the world while a person dreams. But it returns to the body the moment a sleeping person is touched.

Africa remains a small part of the world economy until 2070, when it begins to expand rapidly, reaching 14 percent, the same size as the economy of China, by the end of the century.

Archaeologists now feel certain that eastern and southern Africa provide the world's earliest and most continuous record of human evolution. If so, then this history includes what is arguably some of humankind's earliest food production.