Quotes About Africans

#1. Our daily deeds as ordinary South Africans must produce an actual South African reality that will reinforce humanity's belief in justice, strengthen its confidence in the nobility of the human soul, and sustain all our hopes for a glorious life for all.

Nelson Mandela

#2. The moral and intellectual character of the Africans is widely different in different nations.

Samuel George Morton

#3. Traditionally, Africans hate governments. They hate tyranny.

George Ayittey

#4. As a filmmaker, I want to be known as a pan-African filmmaker and this is because I think that we have more to gain as Africans than as individual countries.

Juliet Asante

#5. What I haven't apologised for is the original concept of seeking to bring justice to all South Africans through the concept of nation states.

F. W. De Klerk

#6. 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

#7. For us Africans, literature must serve a purpose: to expose, embarrass, and fight corruption and authoritarianism. It is understandable why the African artist is utilitarian.

Ama Ata Aidoo

#8. That is my best friend because it is a gift of the creator to Africans. It is a spirit. Marijuana has five fingers of creation ... it enhances all your five senses.

Fela Kuti

#9. You'll find in Africans a fantastic amount of heavy space opera and so on, going on ... which makes the colored African very, very interesting to process because he doesn't know why he goes through all these dances ... and why he feels so barbarous ...

L. Ron Hubbard

#10. I think Africans are very much like white people back home, in that they think they are the center of the universe and that everything that is done is done for them.

Alice Walker

#11. From a genomic perspective, we are all Africans.

Svante Paabo

#12. I definitely don't intend to only make films about Nigerians or Africans. I want to make films about people, any people.

Chika Anadu

#13. The only people who can fix Africa are talented young Africans. By unlocking and nurturing their creative potential, we can create a step change in Africa's future.

Neil Turok

#14. I don't know many South Africans who don't have their eyes wide open to what it's like to be exposed to some sort of violence. The question is whether we choose to be cynical about it or not.

Gavin Hood

#15. The Congolese are consistently rated as the planet's poorest people, significantly worse off than other destitute Africans. In the decade from 2000, the Congolese were the only nationality whose gross domestic product per capita, a rough measure of average incomes, was less than a dollar a day.

Tom Burgis

#16. I just wanted to sing, and I didn't want my music to be unique to the US. I wanted Africans to hear it and know that South African music was still alive.

Letta Mbulu

#17. In places like Germany or France the idea of black-white is not so much black-white but "our people and them," and "them" can be people from the near east like Turks or Muslims or North Africans, all of whom might well be considered white in the United States.

Nell Irvin Painter

#18. Four hundred thousand South Africans are dying of AIDS every year. This makes the war on Iraq look like a birthday party.

Jeremy Cronin

#19. 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

#20. Nike is the uniform for kids all over the world, and African design has been killed by Nike. Africans no longer want to wear their own designs.

M.I.A.

#21. Nobody can come and develop Africa on behalf of Africans.

Mo Ibrahim

#22. In pre-colonial Africa, men who had sexual relationship with older men almost always married a woman later in life and had children. Exclusive homosexuality would not have been and is still not a viable option for Africans who value wealth and patronymic extension through marriage.

Chantal Zabus

#23. We Africans are able to build companies that can operate in the global environment.

Strive Masiyiwa

#24. That was my Malawian epiphany. Only Africans were capable of making a difference in Africa. All the others, donors and volunteers and bankers, however idealistic, were simply agents of subversion.

Paul Theroux

#25. I figured the guy was completely blinded by the rich world that deliberately shows us poor Africans a "paradise" we cannot enter, though he had a point.

Mohamedou Ould Slahi

#26. All men - whether they go by the name of Americans or Russians or Chinese or British or Malayans or Indians or Africans - have obligations to one another that transcend their obligations to their sovereign societies.

Norman Cousins

#27. Although native Africans domesticated some plants in the Sahel and in Ethiopia and in tropical West Africa, they acquired valuable domestic animals only later, from the north.

Jared Diamond

#28. Starbucks itself is a product of diverse global cultures: "Starbuck's customers, whether in Zurich or Beirut, are drinking an American version of an Italian evolution of a beverage invented by Arabs brewed from a bean discovered by Africans."71

Patricia J. Campbell

#29. South Africans must recall the terrible past so that we can deal with it, forgiving where forgiveness is necessary but never forgetting.

Nelson Mandela

#30. The whole world is festering with unhappy souls: The French hate the Germans, the Germans hate the Poles' Italians hate Yugoslavs, South Africans hate the Dutch; and I don't like anybody very much!

Sheldon Harnick

#31. Race is a biased concept; we are in fact all Africans.

Ben Tolosa

#32. We cannot continually barricade ourselves under some falsified idea of race, because our idea of blackness and race is simply reactionary. Africans didn't walk around Africa being black and proud, they walked around proud.

Saul Williams

#33. The tragedy of Africa is that Africans are in the business of canonizing thieves and demonizing its saints.

PLO Lumumba

#34. If the Soviet Union and the United States have not experienced direct military confrontations, on the other hand, they supported, armed and trained Africans, to fight other Africans.

Omar Bongo

#35. Louise Roth Fischer, for caring about the women in Klong Prem Prison and for supporting all South Africans incarcerated abroad.

Hazel Friedman

#36. Those South Africans who berate me for being loyal to our friends, literally they can go and throw themselves into a pool. I am not going to betray the trust of those who helped us.

Nelson Mandela

#37. Many South Africans qualify for working visas in the UK and are keen to experience working and living overseas. However, more and more young people are rebelling against the materialistic 'me' generation and are keen to find meaningful work during their stay.

Susan Harris

#38. When the early Europeans first met Africans, at the crossroads of history, it was a respectful meeting and the Africans were not slaves. Their nations were old before Europe was born.

John Henrik Clarke

#39. America has this understanding of Africans that plays like National Geographic: a bunch of Negroes with loincloths running around the plain fields of Africa chasing gazelles.

Djimon Hounsou

#40. According to Okonkwo, the British via its indirect rule system ensured that Africans saw their native leaders as the demons who betrayed their people. He called it a demonocracy and that was the first time I had seen him become so passionate about issues that affect Africa as a people and continent.

S.A. David

#41. In America, black urban teenagers have long been lacking in inclusion. In France, there is a comparable lack of inclusion among North Africans. In much of Europe, there has been little attempt to include the Roma.

Edmund Phelps

#42. They couldn't have known that slowly, year by year, the ocean's water would ingest a people's fury so completely that hurricanes would come each season and claim lives in recompense for Africans gone overboard.

Daniel Black

#43. Africa for the Africans ... at home and abroad!

Marcus Garvey

#44. In fact the Chinese, the Russians, Eskimos from Greenland, and sub-Saharan Africans are all getting fatter, as is every other population when economic conditions improve and there is increased access to cheaper food.

James B. Johnson

#45. We South Africans are also crazy about football, so the World Cup can be nothing but successful.

Jacob Zuma

#46. The best way to help Africans today is to help them to stand on their own feet. And the best way to do that is by helping create jobs.

Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala

#47. Third World is a state of the mind and until we change our attitude as Africans, if there is a fourth, fifth and even sixth world, we will be in it.

Patrick L.O. Lumumba

#48. I think anyone that comes to Nigeria has to offer value. What value are you bringing? There are Black Americans here. I think we've moved beyond that Africans vs. African Americans. They may have more issues with us than we do with them.

Mo Abudu

#49. Teach the children that Africans are not one iota inferior to Europeans.

Nelson Mandela

#50. 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

#51. We are all Africans under the skin.

Spencer Wells

#52. Even now, at least thirty thousand years after the fact, the signal is discernible: all non-Africans, from the New Guineans to the French to the Han Chinese, carry somewhere between one and four percent Neanderthal DNA.

Elizabeth Kolbert

#53. When most people in the West think about Africa, is their first thought about the game reserves and who's chasing gazelles, or are they looking at Africans as people who are equally equipped to do great things, as in the West?

Djimon Hounsou

#54. The South Africans decided that they would like to prove to the world they did not have any nuclear weapons and their decision was not doubted because it was the end of the Cold War, it was also the end of apartheid.

Hans Blix

#55. Westerners have aggressive problem-solving minds; Africans experience people.

Kenneth Kaunda

#56. In the early 1600s, for nearly two decades, Virginia and Bermuda were the only English colonies in the New World. Here, for the first time, English, Indians, and Africans had to learn to live together. After four hundred years, there is still much to learn.

Virginia Bernhard

#57. I want to remind all Africans, please come to Africa. It's right across the water. Come look at yourselves. Momma is waiting.

Geronimo Pratt

#58. From the beginning, Mandela and Tambo was besieged with clients. We were not the only African lawyers in South Africa, but we were the only firm of African lawyers. For Africans, we were the firm of first choice and last resort.

Nelson Mandela

#59. I saw all races, all colors, blue eyed blonds to black skinned Africans in true brotherhood! In unity! Living as one! Worshiping as one! No segregationists, no liberals; they would not have known how to interpret the meaning of those words

Malcolm X

#60. All people of African descent, whether they live in North or South America, the Caribbean, or in any part of the world are Africans and belong to the African nation.

Kwame Nkrumah

#61. The only violence was when these so-called 'freedom fighters' terrorized the poor Africans in the villages ... They were told what to do and who to support.

Ian Smith

#62. Many Africans are used to a life where they get up in the morning and don't know what they're going to do that day.

Mo Ibrahim

#63. I love ebola jokes. When done in the right way, maybe it gets people to learn about ebola, to learn about the stigmas behind the identities held by Africans and so on.

Trevor Noah

#64. The Islamic people, the Arabs, were the ones who captured Africans, put them in slavery, and sent them to America as slaves. Why would the people in America want to embrace the religion of slavers.

Pat Robertson

#65. Tourists who go to Africa have more of a traditional experience than Africans do. A tourist goes on safari; Africans don't.

Paul Theroux

#66. It would be good for us Africans to accept ourselves as we are and recapture some of the positive aspects of our culture.

Wangari Maathai

#67. Africans had to be taught that nudity is wicked; this was done very cheaply by missionaries.

Bertrand Russell

#68. I had a hard time convincing students that they were going to North Africa to understand the North Africans, not to understand themselves.

Clifford Geertz

#69. The Europeans not only colonialized most of the world, they began to colonialize information about the world and its people. In order to do this, they had to forget, or pretend to forget, all they had previously known abut the Africans.

John Henrik Clarke

#70. South Africans have no concept of time and this is also why we can't solve poverty and social problems ... It's now 10 years since the fall of the Apartheid government and we cannot blame Apartheid for being tardy.

Nelson Mandela

#71. I always felt that I had to leave a legacy on the African continent. As I was only the third player to come to the NBA from Africa, I felt I had to do my best to recruit more young Africans to come and play in the NBA - and also find a way to bring the NBA to Africa.

Dikembe Mutombo

#72. South Africans will kick down a statue of a dead white man but won't even attempt to slap a live one. Yet they can stone to death a black man simply because he's a foreigner

Robert Mugabe

#73. President Bush has committed billions to the fight against AIDS, thus making retroviral drugs available to millions of HIV-positive Africans.

Tony Snow

#74. As Africans Americans we often think about the tragic stories associated with our lineage, but there are a lot of triumphs. Traveling helps you learn about other aspects of our history, like the story of Christ the Redeemer. It's empowering and inspiring.

Laz Alonso

#75. What brought the British to the Gambia in the first place - which was bigger than it is now - was trade in ivory because the Gambia had a lot of elephants. They wiped out all the elephants and ended up selling Africans.

Yahya Jammeh

#76. We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost.

Jeremiah Wright

#77. I believe in self-defense and self-determination for Africans and other oppressed people in America.

Assata Shakur

#78. Yet, thousands of africans and young african youths have failed to acknowledge the significant of what madiba gave them. To me, he be called the pride in black skin and the freedom we are enjoying

Victor Adeagbo

#79. Perhaps the biggest obstacle in destroying white supremacy is the hatred and hostility that Africans have for each other.

Runoko Rashidi

#80. Blood diamonds, she thought. That's exactly what these are. She felt almost as superstitious as the Africans now, as if the pink diamonds themselves had somehow caused all this hardship and death.

Mike Wells

#81. My biggest obsession is to show Africans and the world who the people of Africa really are,

Hugh Masekela

#82. Malaysians talk with Mauritians, Arabs with Australians, South Africans with Sri Lankans, and Iranians with Indonesians. The Indian Ocean serves as both a sea separating them and a bridge linking them together.

Shashi Tharoor

#83. The founding father of Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta, was noted as saying, "When the missionaries arrived, the Africans had the land and the missionaries had the Bible. They taught us how to pray with our eyes closed. When we opened them, they had the land and we had the Bible.

Michael Frost

#84. You may imagine the joy manifested by these poor Africans, when they heard one of their own color address them in a friendly manner, and in a language they could comprehend!

Lewis Tappan

#85. Development aid is one of the reasons for Africa's problems. If the West were to cancel these payments, normal Africans wouldn't even notice. Only the functionaries would be hard hit. Which is why they maintain that the world would stop turning without this development aid.

James Shikwati

#86. Africans ... their tired. They're tired of being the subject of everybody's charity and care. We are grateful, but we know that we can take charge of our own destinies if we have the will to reform.

Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala

#87. It invites a search for ultimate causes: why were Europeans, rather than Africans or Native Americans, the ones to end up with guns, the nastiest germs, and steel?

Jared Diamond

#88. Despite what you may have been taught about Indians or Africans or ancient Celts, poor people are terrible stewards of their environment. For instance, if my kid were starving to death, I would happily feed her fresh panda.

Jonah Goldberg

#89. Suddenly there were no Xhosas or Zulus, no Indians or Africans, no rightists or leftists, no religious or political leaders; we were all nationalists and patriots bound together by a love of our common history our culture, our country, and our people.

Nelson Mandela

#90. Until all Africans stand and speak as free human beings, equal in the eyes of the Almighty; until that day, the African continent shall not know peace.

Haile Selassie

#91. Sudan is not Arab enough for Arabs and not African enough for Africans.

Leila Aboulela

#92. I am a black man inside and outside and you are white men on the outside, but inside, you are Africans like me.

Olusegun Obasanjo

#93. I think it's very humble to believe that there is no man, woman or child who should live in tyranny. That people who say, well, maybe Arabs just aren't ready for democracy or maybe Africans just are going to have corrupt governments, that seems to me arrogant.

Condoleezza Rice

#94. When Europeans came upon real ruined cities they refused to believe that they had been built by Africans. Here the past has been distorted and denied.

Henry Louis Gates

#95. There are two things that have always haunted me: the brutality of the European traders and the stories I've heard about Africans selling other Africans into slavery.

Henry Louis Gates

#96. The Africans know I'm not an African. I'm an American.

Whoopi Goldberg

#97. Helping Africans navigate the transition to modernity with a huge, wonderful wildlife resource still intact.

Patrick Bergin

#98. Africans believed that the woman's bare breast represented God, the circle of life and the moral cleanliness of human beings.

Kola Boof

#99. We say that the ICC is targeting Africans, but all of the victims in our cases in Africa are African victims.

Fatou Bensouda

#100. Africa is a continent in flames. And deep down, if we really accepted that Africans were equal to us, we would all do more to put the fire out. We're standing around with watering cans, when what we really need is the fire brigade.

Bono