Quotes About Africa

#1. I knew right then and there that I would become as courageous as I needed in order to keep him safe. I thought of the soldiers and bullets that I hid from in Asmara. I would stand and fight them to keep Fili safe.

Abeba Habtu

#2. Africa's agricultural sector has enormous scope for development, which would benefit both the continent's economy and its people.

Richard Attias

#3. I am always asked, 'You grew up in Africa?' Every time I introduce a film, or I'm interviewed, 'You grew up in Africa?'

Claire Denis

#4. How terrifically dynamic is our time! We can mobilize all the spiritual, all the moral, all the political strength of Africa and Asia on the side of peace. Yes, we! We, the people of Asia and Africa!

Sukarno

#5. She believed in getting as much use as possible from everything, and thought that as long as machinery, or anything else, could be cajoled into operation, it should be kept; to do otherwise, she thought, was wasteful.

Alexander McCall Smith

#6. In this era of the global village, the tide of democracy is running. And it will not cease, not in China, not in South Africa, not in any corner of this earth, where the simple idea of democracy and freedom has taken root.

Paul Tsongas

#7. We do not accept the Western way of thinking that there are two ways of life. At the same time, the police (here) are not chasing gays. In Africa, sexuality is something very private, even for heterosexuals. Heterosexuals are not parading! But gays want to behave like exhibitionists.

Yoweri Museveni

#8. In the following pages I have endeavoured to describe all that appeared to me most important and interesting among the events and the scenes that came under my notice during my sojourn in the interior of Africa.

John Hanning Speke

#9. If the early Christian accounts of dramatic signs make these works seem foreign and foreboding to segments of modern Western academia,[85] they are nevertheless welcome in many of the dynamic churches of Africa, Latin America, and Asia, which believe that they share their experiences.

Craig S. Keener

#10. What the military will say to a reporter and what is said behind closed doors are two very different things - especially when it comes to the U.S. military in Africa.

Nick Turse

#11. It gives one hope, this great strength of Africa.

Stephen Lewis

#12. The At-mun-shi were as pagan as all the tribes in Africa, but they were peaceable and they were, as well, intense in their love of freedom.

Elizabeth Yates

#13. White rhythm is waltzes, marches, and the polka. In Africa, rhythm is used for a celebratory groove, but white rhythm doesn't have such an enormous vocabulary of spirits. It's basically militant.

Joni Mitchell

#14. There was no United States before slavery. I am sure somebody can make some sort of argument about modern French identity and slavery and North Africa, but there simply is no American history before black people.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#15. May the time come when rich men and great men would think it an honor to support whole stations of missionaries in Africa, instead of spending their money on hounds and horses.

David Livingstone

#16. The government that came into power after the April 1994 elections was going to need a budget. It was drafted by our finance minister, Derek Keys, and he convinced them of the necessity to stay within the free-market principles that had been in force in South Africa for decades.

F. W. De Klerk

#17. I know everything about candy. Would you believe I even know where to find gumballs in the middle of Africa?

Dylan Lauren

#18. You don't grow up naive in Africa.

Claire Denis

#19. When I was in the Peace Corps I never made a phone call. I was in Central Africa; I didn't make a phone call for two years. I was in Uganda for another four years and I didn't make a phone call. So for six years I didn't make a phone call, but I wrote letters, I wrote short stories, I wrote books.

Paul Theroux

#20. Up through and including Lincoln, American politicians nursed a fantasy of repatriating blacks to Africa.

Ned Sublette

#21. People ask me all the time, ALL the time, they say the same exact thing. They say, 'Bo, you're an artist ... how do we fix Africa?'

Bo Burnham

#22. I realized that I was African when I came to the United States. Whenever Africa came up in my college classes, everyone turned to me. It didn't matter whether the subject was Namibia or Egypt; I was expected to know, to explain.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#23. The only difference between [America] and South Africa, South Africa preaches separation and practices separation, America preaches integration and practices segregation. This is the only difference, they don't practice what they preach, whereas South Africa practices and preaches the same thing.

Malcolm X

#24. S'tjwetla is a black man's striptease.

Toba Beta

#25. AFC Leopards were as thrilling a side as ever took the pitch and they dominated East African football in the eighties. That Kenyan players were an excitable bunch was attested to in one memorable Leopards match, with the opposing goalkeeper being handcuffed and dragged away to jail by police.

David Bennun

#26. There is always something new out of Africa.

Pliny The Elder

#27. Christianity is the fastest-growing religion in the world; Islam is the second. It's spreading in Asia, Africa, and South America. So the world is in a kind of religious revival, and the atheists are totally flummoxed. They thought they were winning, and now they see that they aren't.

Dinesh D'Souza

#28. I think I was just too young to even understand what was going on. When I was still living in South Africa, there was still so much racial tension.

St. Lucia

#29. South Africa is the most beautiful country I have been to. Canada is also hugely underrated.

Honor Blackman

#30. We emigrated to South Africa and later to Canada so I went to school in several places.

J. Philippe Rushton

#31. Africa is not a country, but it is a continent like none other. It has that which is elegantly vast or awfully little.

Douglas Wilder

#32. There's no reason the nation of Africa cannot and should not join the ranks of the world's most prosperous nations in the near term, in the decades ahead. There is simply no reason.

Joe Biden

#33. When you look at - when you talk to people in Africa and across the Middle East, they're not satisfied with the way things are going. Sure, this idea of democracy was injected into the region, but it has brought mostly chaos.

Richard Engel

#34. We, the people of South Africa, declare for all our country and the world to know:
That South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white, and that no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of the people.

Nelson Mandela

#35. In 1352, Ibn Batuta, the greatest Arab-language traveler of the Middle Ages, who had journeyed overland across Africa, Europe, and Asia, reported visiting the city of Taghaza, which, he said, was entirely built of salt, including an elaborate mosque.

Mark Kurlansky

#36. I need a visa in almost 38 countries, which means an American has more access into Africa than myself.

Aliko Dangote

#37. We all want a United Africa, United not only in our concept of what unity connotes, but united in our common desire to move forward together in dealing with all the problems that can best be solved only on a continental basis.

Kwame Nkrumah

#38. I am just a tiny person in Africa, but there is a place for me, and for everybody, to sit down on this earth and touch it and call it their own.

Alexander McCall Smith

#39. The African continent has always been more queer than generally acknowledged.

Chantal Zabus

#40. I had a lovely experience once in Africa working with the UN when a president of a country met me about refugee issues and said 'What do you do?' I said 'I'm an actor.' He replied 'I heard that was a very difficult job and might not be the smartest job to do.' It was lovely.

Angelina Jolie

#41. She felt a sense that things were in order, the way they were meant to be, and that even if they tumbled down once in a while, in the end they would come back together again.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#42. Colonialism has a bad reputation in the modern context, but Colonial Africa was a far better place for both black and white before the colonists gave up.

Jeff Cooper

#43. Come to Africa and help! Wherever you may be in the world, there is something you can give back to the continent that gave you a name and an identity, at least.

Nana Awere Damoah

#44. Africa is rich, and why are we poor then if our continent is rich. It is not right.

Mo Ibrahim

#45. AIDS is big business, maybe Africa's biggest business. There's nothing else that can generate as much aid money as shocking figures on AIDS. AIDS is a political disease here, and we should be very skeptical.

James Shikwati

#46. I went to do my first big movie when I was 17. I was in South Africa for three and half months, and I was by myself.

Robert Pattinson

#47. I spent seven months in Africa and came back saying there isn't anything you can say about black people that you couldn't say about, say, pink people except that they're black.

Larry Rivers

#48. Now in the 1980s, I happened to notice that if you look at an aerial photograph of an African village, you see fractals. And I thought, 'This is fabulous! I wonder why?' And of course I had to go to Africa and ask folks why.

Ron Eglash

#49. What did I know about the fifty-five (give or take) countries of Africa? I carried within me one deep personal thread of one small part of it, and it had changed and colored everything,

Alexandra Fuller

#50. You are not a country, Africa. You are a concept ... You are not a concept, Africa. You are a glimpse of the infinite.

Ali Mazrui

#51. I climb behind the steering wheel... I drive off immediately without once looking back; it's a long journey but it leads to freedom.

Corinne Hofmann

#52. My cardinal belief is that it is the natives of the land that till the land best, with passion and meaning. The advanced nations of this world built their countries by the sweat of their indigenes.

Nana Awere Damoah

#53. Professor Khupe felt his chest swell with pride. It was doing so without his encouragement. If an electrical fault had stopped the elevator from rising, his inflating ego would have powered the remainder of their journey to the twenty-second floor.

Taona Dumisani Chiveneko

#54. Clean water and power is our right as humans on this earth, and for too long, our governments in Africa have failed to provide these things.

William Kamkwamba

#55. Huh. What a dope! Wait till Mom hears about this. He's so in trouble now. You know how crazy she gets about malaria.

T.K. Naliaka

#56. I could never live happily in Africa-or anywhere else-until I could live freely in Mississippi.

Alice Walker

#57. To all those who have drawn the inference from my words that Africa, as a continent, is somehow genetically inferior, I can only apologise unreservedly.

James D. Watson

#58. Vaida planted her shoulders into the back of her chair and slid her lower body towards the edge of the seat. The fabric of her retracting skirt increased the protrusion of her legs. When she was in position, Vaida made a fine adjustment to achieve the desired view.

Taona Dumisani Chiveneko

#59. I'm not going to be an interpreter at the U.N. I'm not going to live in Africa on a farm or whatever, but I am going to see the world through those eyes when I make those films.

Sydney Pollack

#60. Wasn't there a tribe in Africa that lashed the dead body to the back of the one who had murdered it? That would certainly be justice - to carry the rotting corpse around as a physical burden as well as public shame and damnation.

Toni Morrison

#61. It is fair to say that Africa has become a major force in moving the world towards multi-polarity, an important emerging market that helps promote global economic recovery and integration, and an outstanding representative of diverse civilizations in the world.

Li Keqiang

#62. All these boundaries - Africa, Asia, Malaysia, America - are set by men. But you don't have to look at boundaries when you are looking at a man - at the character of a man. The question is: What do you stand for? Are you a follower, or are you a leader?

Hakeem Olajuwon

#63. I have lived in countries that were coming out of conflict: Ireland, South Africa, the Czech republic. People there are overflowing with energy.

Brian Eno

#64. Weak, tea-drinking, effeminate, ineffectual
masters of India, robbers of South Africa, bedevillers of all Europe.

Christina Stead

#65. [Mark] Epprecht's larger thesis [...] is that Europeans introduced homophobia, not homosexuality, to Africa.

Chantal Zabus

#66. As a young woman, I dreamed of changing the world. In my twenties, I went to Africa to try and save the continent, only to learn that Africans neither wanted nor needed saving. Indeed, when I was there, I saw some of the worst that good intentions, traditional charity, and aid can produce ...

Jacqueline Novogratz

#67. Frankly, and let me be blunt, Wikipedia as a readable product is not for us. It's for them. It's for that girl in Africa who can save the lives of hundreds of thousands of people around her, but only if she's empowered with the knowledge to do so.

Jimmy Wales

#68. The human story is one of continual branching movement, out of Africa to every corner of the globe. When people talk of blood and soil, as if their ancestors sprung fully formed from the earth of a particular place, it involves a kind of forgetting.
(Hari Kunzru)

Carolina De Robertis

#69. But since independence, Gabon is one of the few countries in Central Africa that enjoys peace and stability.

Omar Bongo

#70. The World Health Organisation has a lot of its medical experts sitting in Geneva while hospitals in Africa have no drugs and desperate patients are forced to seek medication on the black market.

Pauline Hanson

#71. We will provide aviation, construction, and logistics services first throughout Africa and then throughout the rest of the world.

Erik Prince

#72. The coffin was handmade from the wood of a single Eucalyptus tree. There were no handles, it rested on the shoulders of six elegant tribesmen. These were Maasai from Kenya, the warrior tribe, known for their courage and endurance. The walkers followed at a respectful distance, the pace was grueling.

Nick Hahn

#73. I don't like to go to strange places. I was in Italy for about five hours on my way to Africa.

Nina Simone

#74. Father's always saying that South Africa must be one of the best countries in the world for surviving a zombie apocalypse,' Megan says seriously. 'It's full of security estates and high fences.

Lily Herne

#75. Press Freedom will never be under threat in South Africa for as long as the ANC is the majority party

Nelson Mandela

#76. When I am in Africa, I realize I don't know much, have not seen much, and there's a lot to be done.

Henry Rollins

#77. Inspiring scenes of people taking the future of their countries into their own hands will ignite greater demands for good governance and political reform elsewhere in the world, including in Asia and in Africa.

William Hague

#78. I never hesitated, as a student, in embracing the necessity of violence. In South Africa, I didn't just accept it; I looked forward to it as a mission.

Wole Soyinka

#79. Most Americans think of hunger as a problem affecting only places like India, Africa or South America. But it is a tragic reality that our country has millions of children who are suffering from lack of food. We must all work together to save our country from this problem.

Beverly Johnson

#80. Reality shows that, contrary to other countries in southern Africa, we have no basis for a classical guerilla struggle. We have never had a hinterland, and we do not expect to.

Joe Slovo

#81. You could have just said Ngozi is your tribal name and Ifemelu is your jungle name and throw in one more as your spiritual name. They'll believe all kinds of shit about Africa.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#82. I have led the way for moving women from traditional roles to strategic positions and inspired girls and women throughout Africa to seek leadership positions.

Dalia Grybauskaite

#83. Poor laborers from all parts of Asia as well as Africa, the Americas and even Europe are transported by plane each day to wealthier nations where low-tier jobs are plentiful; sometimes the travelers board without even knowing their final destination.

Alan Huffman

#84. Africa is an extraordinary opportunity at the moment

David Adjaye

#85. Steve Harmison was a big disappointment in South Africa, and I don't know the reason why, but he has to lift his game.

Jeff Thomson

#86. Congolese rumba was so huge in Africa that everybody was inspired by it. But my African roots brought me this music. In every African family, parties in Brussels, we used to listen to this kind of music. And salsa music as well.

Stromae

#87. Africa is on the move; a new Africa is emerging!

Barack Obama

#88. Pescatore marveled at the seascape. It gave him vertigo. The wind deployed cloud formations. The sun seared the Moroccan coastline. He had read a line once about "the lion-colored hills of Africa." Were they lion-colored? What color was a lion exactly?

Sebastian Rotella

#89. The idea of an Afrikaner people as a cultural entity and religious group with a special language will be retained in South Africa as long as civilisation stands.

P. W. Botha

#90. The ANC will rule South Africa until Jesus comes back.

Jacob Zuma

#91. I never think of playing for South Africa. It's the furthest thing from my mind.

Kevin Pietersen

#92. Most of the songs came from Europe and Africa and now they were coming back to us. Many of [Bob] Dylan's best songs came from Scotland, Ireland or England. It was a sort of cultural exchange.

John Lennon

#93. South Africa is labouring to find its revolutionary path; the colours of the Rainbow Nation have difficulty blending together; the wealthy elites (white, black or Indian) profit from de facto segregation.

Tariq Ramadan

#94. Malaria-hosting mosquitoes will not wait politely during their most active evening feeding hours for people to go to bed under mosquito nets.

T.K. Naliaka

#95. We can't stop a baby in Africa from starving to death ... but we can afford enough technology and weaponry to blow the world up a million times over.

Paul Weller

#96. There's great wine from Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Chile and, of course, California. But there's nothing like a really great French wine, they're so well balanced. The better the wine, the less you feel the effects I think.

Ridley Scott

#97. I learned that along with the towering achievements of the cultures of ancient Greece and China there stood the culture of Africa, unseen and denied by the imperialist looters of Africa's material wealth.

Paul Robeson

#98. Educational opportunities have supported the rise of the African middle class, the professional cadre of young people who are now willing and able to contribute to Africa's future prosperity.

Mo Ibrahim

#99. One avoids Creolisms. Some families completely forbid Creole and mothers ridicule their children for speaking it.

Frantz Fanon

#100. Global warming is another big area that we need to get on top of. [And] diseases in Africa, which we're also working on and seeing if we can make a difference on. And there are lots of issues that governments seem to be blind about.

Richard Branson