#africa

No other continent has endured such an unspeakably bizarre combination of foreign thievery and foreign goodwill. ↗

— Barbara Kingsolver

#bible

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, -- this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost... He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American... ↗

— W.E.B. Du Bois

#dubois #identity #pragmatism #progress #progress

- Com'è l'Africa? - gli chiedevano. - Stanca. ↗

— Alessandro Baricco

#geography #africa

The measure of civilized behavior is compassion. ↗

— Paul Theroux

#humanity #travel #africa

We learn from history that we don't learn from history! ↗

— Desmond Tutu

#history #south-africa #africa

You learn not to mourn every little thing out here, or you’d never, ever stop grieving. ↗

— Alexandra Fuller

#grief #grieving #africa

We pull on to the road, where our only company are the wandering cattle, who have become commonplace as traffic lights. Lethargic and listless, they look like they've been roaming the roads of Guinea since the dawn of time. And no doubt they will continue to long after we're gone. ↗

— Tom Hiddleston

#guinea #unicef #africa

I'm sorry I started all this by trying to fly and I'd take it back if I could but I can't, so please think of it from my point of view: if you die I will have a dead brother and it will be me instead of you who suffers. Justin thought of his brother on that warm summer day, standing up on the windowsill holding both their futures, light and changeable as air, in his outstretched arms. Of course, Justin thought, I'm part of his fate just as he's part of mine. I hadn't considered it from his point of view. Or from the point of view of the universe, either. It's just a playing field crammed full of cause and effect, billions of dominoes, each knocking over billions more, setting off trillions of actions every second. A butterfly flaps its wings in Africa and my brother in Luton thinks he can fly. The child nodded. A piano might fall on your head, he said, but it also might not. And in the meantime you never know. Something nice might happen. ↗

— Meg Rosoff

#africa

The continent is too large to describe. It is a veritable ocean, a separate planet, a varied, immensely rich cosmos. Only with the greatest simplification, for the sake of convenience, can we say 'Africa'. In reality, except as a geographical appellation, Africa does not exist. ↗

— Ryszard Kapuściński

#africa

So, in "Melting Pot" the children (about a third of whom were kids of color) sang the line, "America was the new world and Europe was the old," in one stroke eradicating the narratives of indigenous persons for whom America was hardly new, and any nonwhite kids whose old worlds had been in Africa or Asia, not Europe. ↗

— Tim Wise

#national-myths #racism #africa