Quotes About Africa

It was a no-brainer that the cellular route would be a great success in Africa.

I must say the idea of a United Africa was nonsense.

There is no intrinsic reason African countries should be importing, rather than exporting, basic staples like rice or higher value products like frozen chicken, cooking oil, or instant noodles.

I read all of Rider Haggard's books. For me he had the romance of Africa with a little bit of mysticism. I'm delighted to be looked on as his heir and be categorised as an adventure novelist because that's exactly what I am.

Too many African countries have already hit rock-bottom - ungoverned, poverty-stricken, and lagging further and further behind the rest of the world each day; there is nowhere further to go down.

One wonders what the proper high-brow Romans ... read into the strange utterances of Lucretius or Apuleius or Tertullian, Augustine or Athanasius. The uncanny voice of Iberian Spain, the weirdness of old Carthage, the passion of Libya and North Africa.

Behold little Belgium and her pitiable plight, but has the world forgotten Congo? What Belgium now suffers is not half, not even a tenth, of what she has done to black Congo since Stanley's great dream of 1880. Down the dark forests of inmost Africa sailed this modern Sir Galahad, in the name of the noble-minded men of several nations, to introduce commerce and civilization. What came of it? Rubber and murder, slavery in its worst form, wrote Glave in 1895.

America means above all toleration, catholicity, welcome, freedom--a concern for Europe, for Asia, for Africa, along with its concern for America. It is something quite peculiar, hardly to be stated--evades you as the air--yet is a fact everywhere preciously present.

THE AFTERNOON PASSED quietly enough. I logged onto the BBC website and perused the world, starting in Africa. I always start there, looking to see what the news providers of American TV didn't deem important.

Political instability is manifesting itself in Africa as a chronic symptom of the underdevelopment of political life within the imperialist context. Military coups have followed one after the other, usually meaning nothing to the mass of the people, and sometimes representing a reactionary reversal of the efforts at national liberation.

It is in line with racist prejudice to say openly or to imply that their countries are more developed because their people are innately superior, and that the responsibility for the economic backwardness of Africa lies in the generic backwardness of the race of black Africans.

The true explanation lies in seeking out the relationship between Africa and certain developed countries and in recognizing that it is a relationship of exploitation.

The whole import-export relationship between Africa and its trading partners is one of unequal exchange and of exploitation.

When citizens of Europe own the land and the mines of Africa, this is the most direct way of sucking the African continent. Under colonialism, the ownership was complete and backed by military domination.

So long as foreigners own land, mines, factories, banks, insurance companies, means of transportation, newspapers, power stations, then for so long will the wealth of Africa flow outwards into the hands of those elements

However, it is very essential at this stage to draw a clear distinction between the capitalist countries and the socialist ones, because socialist countries have never at any time owned any part of the African continent nor do they invest in African economies in such a way as to expatriate profits from Africa.

Ancient Africa was int he mainstream of human history.

Christianity initially rejected zero, but trade would soon demand it. The man who reintroduced zero to the West was Leonardo of Pisa. The son of an Italian trader, he traveled to northern Africa. There the young man-better known as Fibonacci-learned Mathematics from the Muslims and soon became a good mathematician in his own right.

In the Nile Valley, civilization resulted from man's adaptation to that particular milieu. As declared by the Ancients and by the Egyptians themselves, it originated in Nubia. This is confirmed by our knowledge that the basic elements of Egyptian civilization are neither in Lower Egypt, nor in Asia, nor in Europe, but in Nubia and the heart of Africa; moreover, that is where we find the animals and plants represented in hieroglyphic writing....

If modern civilization should disappear today, but leave libraries untouched, survivors could open almost any book and perceive immediately that persons living south of the Sahara are called "Blacks." The term "Black Africa" would suffice to indicate the habitat of the Black race. Nothing similar is found in Egyptian texts. Whenever the Egyptians use the word "Black" (khem), it is to designate themselves or their country: Kemit, land of the Blacks.

By the Middle Ages… the introduction of the Trivium was well-known: SÂDI, an educated black from Tombouctou, author of the well-known work entitled, 'Tarikh es-Soudan' cites amongst the subjects that he mastered, logic, dialection, grammar, rhetoric, not to mention law and other disciplines...the long lists of subjects studied and the lettered African intellectuals who taught them at the University of Tombouctou…

Until now (1960, date of the first edition), the history of Black Africa has always been written with dates as dry as laundry lists, and no one has almost ever tried to find the key that unlocks the door to the intelligence, the understanding of African society.

Yet the documents at our disposal allow us to do that practically without any break in continuity for a period of two thousand years, at least insofar as West Africa is concerned. Therefore, it had become indispensable to unfreeze, in a manner of speaking to defossilize that African history which was there at hand, lifeless, imprisoned in the documents.

...the drums of Africa still beat in my heart.