Quotes About African Culture

#1. A lot of my work reflects the incredible influence that America has had on contemporary African culture. Some of it's insidious, some of it's innocuous, some of it's invisible. It's there.

Wangechi Mutu

#2. Jamestown changed the world in many ways, but perhaps it shaped our nation most profoundly the day Africans arrived. I can't think of a more relevant place to talk about the issues facing our community today than the place where African culture became American culture.

Tavis Smiley

#3. It's depressing to see blacks wanting to dive into the mainstream of American commercial life. They come from a magnificent African culture based on aesthetics, and they all want to become fort builders like the vicious people who originally enslaved them.

George Carlin

#4. I've got to where am in life not because of something I brought to the world but through something I found - the wealth of African culture.

Hugh Masekela

#5. The equilibrium you admire in me is an unstable one, difficult to maintain. My inner life was split early between the call of the Ancestors and the call of Europe, between the exigencies of black-African culture and those of modern life.

Leopold Sedar Senghor

#6. Perhaps it is time to debate culture. The common story is that in 'real' African culture, before it was tainted by the West, gender roles were rigid and women were contentedly oppressed.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#7. The education I received was a British education, in which British ideas, British culture, British institutions, were automatically assumed to be superior. There was no such thing as African culture.

Nelson Mandela

#8. Feminist is so heavy with baggage, negative baggage: You hate men, you hate bras, you hate African culture, you think women should always be in charge, you don't wear makeup, you don't shave, you're always angry, you don't have a sense of humor, you don't use deodorant.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#9. It's obvious that the rest of the world loves high African culture - African culture, period.

Hugh Masekela

#10. I was in Paris last year, where there's a great appreciation of many different aspects of African culture and of black culture. The music ... the art ... whatever ... And I kind of went with that.

Lenny Kravitz

#11. 'Who Fears Death' addresses the push and pull in African culture that powerful women face when their culture has certain duties and beliefs that can stifle them.

Nnedi Okorafor

#12. To live your life well, and have respect for what came before or after - there's a strong respect for that in African culture.

Anna Deavere Smith

#13. I think there's beauty in repetition. And that's part of my culture and African culture as well: repeated things, mantra. It's spiritual, it's meditation, it's Buddhism, it's praying, it's all these things.

Robert Glasper

#14. We have to realize our black heritage in order to give us strength to move on and progress. But as far as returning to the old African culture, it's unnecessary and it's not advantageous in many respects. We believe that culture itself will not liberate us. We're going to need some stronger stuff.

Huey Newton

#15. Oral tradition is practised in most African cultures: ideals, family histories and legacies are handed down from one generation to the other physically or verbally. However, this system is flawed in the sense that a lot of African innovation, experience and culture have been lost, undocumented.

Nana Awere Damoah

#16. In the long, nonillustrious history of white people pilfering African American culture, have I just perpetrated that? I'm motivated by a love for the music and by a love of the performances, and I really hope I haven't done anything bad.

Moby

#17. Haiti is unique - the first successful slave revolt in history, the first black republic etc., and then when you get into the culture, the voodoo, and that wonderful synchretization of Christian and African belief and symbology, it's like nothing the world has ever seen.

Ben Fountain

#18. Jesse Jackson's living depends on the maintenance of an African-American victim culture

Mark Steyn

#19. African-Americans are not a monolithic group. So, we tend to talk about the black community, the black culture, the African-American television viewing audience, but there are just as many facets of us as there are other cultures.

Malcolm-Jamal Warner

#20. To make an absolutely gross generalization, I think a lot of people feel like if you're mixed, more often than not you're quote unquote white. So if you're mixed, you embrace the mainstream culture more than the African-American culture.

Keegan-Michael Key

#21. As players of instruments, it is our duty to reach out and give light to those in the dark in whatever way that we can. All my actions are a fulfilment of all the African music genres - I'm only trying to maintain the culture and the tradition. I am a musician.

Sizzla

#22. In African American culture, class bias is the handmaiden of intraracial prejudice that privileges the near-white or light-complexioned person over the darker-hued.

Rita B. Dandridge

#23. Names are powerful and are prophecies of the future. The name you are called is a sign of what you are and what you would become.

Jude Idada

#24. What we call soul has been around a long time. It comes out of a particular culture that is African in origin, but influenced by 250 years of slavery, as well as other forms of racial oppression.

Roy Ayers

#25. Popular culture - above all rock 'n' roll, with its African-American R & B roots - did far more to radicalize us than did any feminist leader.

Camille Paglia

#26. Black is not a notion. Africa is not a color. Africa is a culture. So you can be pitch black and I am my color but I'm more African than you can ever be because culturally there are certain things that you just don't understand.

Jihan El-Tahri

#27. The African-American community still needs to come together as one and stand up for rights of the people and of what's happening in their culture, their community.

Ziggy Marley

#28. The author relates the progress of inoculation against smallpox in America with the interaction between an African slave named Onisimus whose homeland knew how to treat the malady and and leading clergyman Cotton Mather who was curious and open-minded enough to listen to him.

Robert J. Allison

#29. I try to find the core values that are so fundamental that they transcend ethnic identity. That doesn't mean I run from it. I embrace African-American culture and I love it and embrace it, but it is a part of a human identity. So I'm always trying to make a larger human statement.

Wynton Marsalis

#30. My particular lifetime, my individual profile, represents something very basic to African-American history and culture because I was a second generation immigrant, so to speak, from the South. My grandfather was born in South Carolina - well, both grandfathers were born in the South.

John Edgar Wideman

#31. It's one thing when other African-Americans try to threaten my race card, but when people outside of my ethnicity have the audacity to question how 'down' I am because of the bleak, stereotypical picture pop culture has painted for me as a black woman? Unacceptable.

Issa Rae

#32. It is my hope that as we commemorate Black History Month in the future, we will continue to celebrate the many achievements and rich culture of African-Americans.

Eliot Engel

#33. When I got near teen age, I was so happy with my friends and the African-American culture that I couldn't imagine not being part of it.

Johnny Otis

#34. From politics and business to music and food to culture, African-Americans have helped to shape our state's colourful past and its future.

Mary Landrieu

#35. From blood banking to the modern subway, from jazz to social justice, the contributions of African Americans have shaped and molded and influenced our national culture and our national character.

Bill Frist

#36. Culture is about humanizing people. You look at the African-American civil rights movement, you look at the LGBT rights movement - the culture changed before the politics did.

Jose Antonio Vargas

#37. What city has given the world more in terms of American culture than New Orleans? There is none. Not New York. Not L.A. Not Chicago. Not anywhere, in the sense that African American music has gone around the world twenty times over, and it's continuing to evolve. It is our greatest cultural export.

David Simon

#38. What the new government of Nigeria and other African governments must do, is to start a massive reorientation campaign in the culture of the dignity of labour.

Sunday Adelaja

#39. There's a thing called the 'One Drop' theory in African-American culture, which is if you have one drop of black blood in you, you're black.

Keegan-Michael Key

#40. I'd like to state that Spike Lee is not saying that African American culture is just for black people alone to enjoy and cherish. Culture is for everybody.

Spike Lee

#41. I didn't want to try and borrow kudos from Indonesian culture. I was trying to get a fresh perspective on these instruments. I'm not doing a Paul Simon Gracelands and stealing all this African music and not give anyone any credit.

Squarepusher

#42. Coming up in the African-American culture, we were taught that we belonged to the universe and society was wrong in the way it dealt with us. We had to learn to express and affirm values not from the winning position.

Bernice Johnson Reagon

#43. When their voices didn't reach my ears,
I rebelled against my own skin
too young to realize that without their
stories I would starve.

Kiana Davis

#44. So, Mexico, Brazil, they wanted their national culture to be 'blackish' - really brown, a beautiful brown blend. And finally, I discovered that in each of these societies the people at the bottom are the darkest skinned with the most African features.

Henry Louis Gates

#45. The Afro-American experience is the only real culture that America has. Basically, every American tries to walk, talk, dress and behave like African Americans.

Hugh Masekela

#46. I'm African-American by my culture, not by my color. Race does not exist.

Terry Crews

#47. The insidious aid culture has left African countries more debt-laden, more inflation-prone, more vulnerable to the vagaries of the currency markets and more unattractive to higher-quality investment.

Dambisa Moyo

#48. American high school culture was impenetrable to me, and very cliquey: you had the Hispanics, the African Americans, the surfer guys and the goths and the immigrants. The jocks and the surfers got the girls. By the time I'd got to grips with it, I'd graduated.

Khaled Hosseini

#49. It wasn't until I came to New York and started to see the African American community, but also the Ethiopian community here, and started to eat the food, started to understand the music. I said, you know, I got to go and understand the culture. So me and my sister went.

Marcus Samuelsson

#50. Martin Luther King, Jr., would have been the last person to have wanted his iconization and his heroism. He was an enormously guilt-laden man. He was drenched in a sense of shame about his being featured as the preeminent leader of African-American culture and the civil rights movement.

Michael Eric Dyson

#51. For a certain generation of African immigrants cleaning offices became part of the culture like male circumcision and supporting Arsenal.

Ben Aaronovitch

#52. I feel like Africans are too often portrayed as people on the National Geographic channel: the image is of an African man in a loincloth chasing a gazelle. It's not intentionally racist; I wouldn't call it racist at all. It's a lack of understanding another culture.

Djimon Hounsou

#53. The treatment of African and African American culture in our education was no different from their treatment in Tarzan movies.

Ishmael Reed

#54. My name, Solange, means 'Angel of the sun,' and I'm completely enamored of my African history. The culture is so expressive.

Solange Knowles

#55. One of the biggest dishes in Sicily is couscous, and there's always been a North African influence on Italian culture, culinary culture there.

Jonas Carpignano

#56. I don't believe in the clash of cultures. The culture is one. The culture is a ring off the same chain. Picasso was very much influenced by the African arts, and he influenced a whole other generation of artists. So everything influences everything.

Marjane Satrapi

#57. I majored in directing. However, I did spend some time at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, so I am somewhat well-versed in African Studies.

Chadwick Boseman

#58. People ask me if I miss the States. I miss African Americans. But not the U.S. government or all the things they put me through. I miss African American culture, our speech, dance and cooking.

Assata Shakur