West African Sayings

#1. Guinea has managed to go 42 days consecutively without any new Ebola infections. And that comes after neighboring Sierra Leone and Liberia, the other two West African countries that were hardest hit by Ebola, have been through the same cycle of zero Ebola cases.

Ofeibea Quist-Arcton

#2. I consider myself West African, among other cultural identities, and a writer, among other creative ones.

Taiye Selasi

#3. In Nigeria, along with its West African neighbor Ghana, women are now starting businesses in greater numbers than men.

Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

#4. My mother is a fighter. After she battled polio and learned to walk again, the doctors told her she would be a cripple her entire life. Instead of accepting defeat, she refused this fate and went on to become the West African Women's Singles tennis champion in college.

Uzo Aduba

#5. In West African and Caribbean folklores the role falls to Anansi, a spider who sometimes imparts knowledge or wisdom - and sometimes casts doubt or seeds confusion. Eshu,

Gabriella Coleman

#6. The breezes of the West African night were intimate and shy, licking the hair, sweeping through cotton dresses with unseemly intimacy, then disappearing into the utter blackness.

Maya Angelou

#7. British physician, West African Countries and Peoples Man's place is higher than the sky. Respect for man is the underlying spirit of civilization.

Muhammad Iqbal

#8. Nigeria is a West African nation of over 100 million energetic people. It is endowed with lots of natural resources but lacks human resources.

Philip Emeagwali

#9. The motto of West African cooking is that if the food doesn't set fire to the tablecloth the cook is being stingy with the pepper.

Ben Aaronovitch

#10. The industrial powerhouse of 1950 [Detroit] is now a crime-ridden wasteland with a functioning literacy rate equivalent to West African basket-cases.

Mark Steyn

#11. I grew up singing Mexican music, and that's based on indigenous Mexican rhythms. Mexican music also has an overlay of West African music, based on huapango drums, and it's kind of like a 6/8 time signature, but it really is a very syncopated 6/8. And that's how I attack vocals.

Linda Ronstadt

#12. Ebola has spread to five West African countries and infected 5,864 people, of which 2,811 have died, according to the World Health Organization's Sept. 22 report.

Anonymous

#13. Few rappers realize the genre sprang from West African griots through Delta slave songs to jazz poetry and the comedic trash talk of 'the dozens.'

Quincy Jones

#14. When we rise in the morning ... at the table we drink coffee which is provided to us by a South American, or tea by a Chinese, or cocoa by a West African; before we leave for our jobs we are already beholden to more than half the world.

Martin Luther King Jr.

#15. I've come across a novel called The Palm-Wine Drinkard, by the Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola, that is really remarkable because it is a kind of fantasy of West African mythology all told in West African English which, of course, is not the same as standard English.

William Golding

#16. My mum is West African, from Senegal; my dad is from Grenada. There was a huge controversy about them getting together.

Estelle

#17. I stream this radio station, Radio Nova, that's based in Paris. They curate a beautiful set that's really all over the place - they'll play blues or some West African music, then A Tribe Called Quest, then funk from Ethiopia, then James Brown, and then the Beatles. It's an amazing mix.

Zoe Kravitz

#18. a butterfly in a West African rain forest, by flitting to the left of a tree rather than to the right, possibly set into motion a chain of events that escalates into a hurricane striking coastal South Carolina a few weeks later?

Erik Larson

#19. ... the Genesis story is just one that happened to have been adopted by one particular tribe of Middle Eastern herders. It has no more special status than the belief of a particular West African tribe that the world was created from the excrement of ants.

Richard Dawkins

#20. Ishmael Beah was born and spent his childhood in Sierra Leone as that sad but beautiful West African country was ravaged by a civil war that left some 50,000 dead between 1991 and 2002. He was a child soldier for a while, then, through extraordinary circumstances, was set free of that life.

Carolyn See

#21. "Softly, softly, catchee monkey," is the West African rendering of a very valuable precept. An awful lot of men fail through lack of patient persistence.

Robert Baden-Powell

#22. Jazz is really 20th-century fusion music. You take West African harmony and rhythm, mix with European harmony, and boom!

Christian Scott

#23. As the Iberian explorers made their way down the African coast - the Portuguese going around the Horn to East Asia, the Spaniards cutting west to the Americas - both powers had two main goals in mind: finding precious metals and planting sugarcane. (Oh, and spreading the word of God.) The

Tom Reiss

#24. Whether or not all this came to pass in an East African ditch, I wouldn't like to say. Perhaps it happened in North Africa or further west, but Africa was definitely the place.

Richard Leakey

#25. It was easy for me to be ridiculed and for both men and women to perceive that maybe I'm a bit crazy because I'm educated in the West and I have lost some of my basic decency as an African woman.

Wangari Maathai

#26. African music, though very old, is always being rediscovered in the West.

Miriam Makeba

#27. 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

#28. My mum translated this in her head to "witchfinder," which was good because like most West Africans, she considered witchfinding a more respectable profession than policeman.

Ben Aaronovitch

#29. My dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black men. As a young brother who grows up in a white context, brilliant African father, he's always had to fear being a white man with black skin. All he has known culturally is white. He has a certain rootlessness, a deracination.

Cornel West

#30. Me being a black girl in London, whose mom is first-generation African and whose dad is West Indian, gives me a different view. I'm coming at soul from my own place.

Estelle

#31. Because of its exceptional capacity for self-criticism, the West took the initiative in abolishing slavery; the calls for abolition did not resonate even in black Africa, where rival African tribes took black prisoners to be sold as slaves in the West.

Ibn Warraq

#32. My passion is more about bringing the stories out from the African continent mixed with the West.

Djimon Hounsou

#33. It's strange; when I was younger and people would ask, 'Where are you from?', I'd say, 'West Africa', which was odd because I'm obviously not African, but it was my home.

William Boyd

#34. Well, I'm a daughter of the great migration as, really, the majority of African Americans that you meet in the north and west are products of the great migration. It's that massive. Many of us owe our very existence to the fact that people migrated.

Isabel Wilkerson

#35. African narratives in the West, they proliferate. I really don't care anymore. I'm more interested in the stories we tell about ourselves - how, as a writer, I find that African writers have always been the curators of our humanity on this continent.

Chris Abani

#36. There's no doubt that many of the mainstream white institutions tend to be cosmetic and symbolic when it comes to including African-Americans, whereas we black folk tend to be much more sensitive about embracing others, and we have a long history of that.

Cornel West

#37. In Obama's case, we've enabled affirmative action to find a home in the nation's highest office. There you have it. I said it and I stand by it. America fell for the gimmick candidate, disregarding every fact and warning sign in the rush to have 'the first African-American president.'

Allen West

#38. As African economies boom and businesses are created, one of the big questions this growth raises is that of third-level education: how can Africa develop a knowledge infrastructure to rival that of the west, a sort of Harvard University in Africa?

Richard Attias