Words matter. These are the best African Quotes from famous people such as Montesquieu, Mo Ibrahim, Eliza Dushku, Desmond Tutu, Leila Slimani, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Weak minds exaggerate too much the wrong done to the Africans.
Many African people are smarter than me – kids who could have been better. I have no claim for genius.
The Nobel Prize is worth $1.5 million, but that’s not the issue. Do the distinguished scientists who win the Nobel Prize need the money? Probably not. The honor is more important the money, and that’s the case with the prize for African leadership as well.
I think people hear and feel the genuine nature of my passion for the causes. Specifically, with the non-profit in Uganda, my mother is the president, and she was an African politics professor for almost 50 years, so I think people know that I align myself with people who know what they’re talking about.
I mean in the South African case, many of those who were part of death squads would have been respectable members of their white community, people who went to church on Sunday, every Sunday.
I, too, am interested in identity and Islam, which is what people expect of us. But one must not write what is expected. It’s important for North African writers to show they have other things to say.
Virtually all of Darfur’s six million residents are Muslim, and, because of decades of intermarriage, almost everyone has dark skin and African features.
I wish, to be honest with you, for African American films that we could get a few more theaters. They only open them in 1500 to 2000 for an opening weekend, and how do you expect us to compete. How can we go to certain box office levels if they don’t give us more theaters?
The African American community is so under-served in the entertainment industry.
Because I don’t play guitar any more, African harmonies and rhythms have been an inspiration to me. I love the raw origin of the sound. It complements my voice and words naturally.
Where the costs of entry are minimal, there is a wide avenue of opportunity for those with little or nothing, which is why football is just about the most democratic sport of all: African and Brazilian footballers compete on a level playing field with their rich white European counterparts.
As African Americans, we always have to fight for inclusion, despite your moral background: Christian, Muslim, Jewish – it doesn’t matter.
I can actually trace the moment I decided I couldn’t be a doctor. It was in biology, they brought in these African crickets and we were supposed to dissect them – but there’s no way I was touching those bugs.
Trinidad’s language is a fusion of English, African, and French, and so we have our own words and even our own dictionary. Steupse is a common local word, and it’s the onomatopoeic word for the sound people make to show disapproval, or to show they are vexed, when they suck their teeth together.
The sad truth is that without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents, the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible, at least on the scale it occurred.
My name, Solange, means ‘Angel of the sun,’ and I’m completely enamored of my African history. The culture is so expressive.
Among the friends of Union, there is great diversity of sentiment and of policy in regard to slavery and the African race among us.
Perhaps sooner than we think, African innovations will help the rest of the world create lasting social and economic value.
The South African government, unlike a lot of African governments, isn’t poor.
I was taught about slavery, but it was the ancient Egyptians. That’s the closest I got to African history.
Zimbabwe has lots of safaris, but very few are African. Most are white-owned. In our region, we have the most safaris and animals. Our people cannot keep suffering.
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.
Ever since I watched ‘Roots,’ I’ve dreamed of tracing my African ancestry and helping other people do the same.
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?
Before I started Coffee of Grace, I assumed all coffee came from Latin America or Indonesia. I wasn’t familiar with African coffee.
I feel like I come from a smaller off shoot of black people because I am mixed. People say I’m African American but that doesn’t include the other half of me.
Argentine political life is like the life of an ant community or an African forest tribe: full of events, full of crisis and deaths, but life is always cyclical, and the year ends as it begins.
There is no intrinsic reason African countries should be importing, rather than exporting, basic staples like rice or higher value products like frozen chicken, cooking oil, or instant noodles.
Globalization and deindustrialization affected workers of all colors but hit African Americans particularly hard.
Looking at the numbers, the transatlantic slave trade matches the Holocaust in horror – maybe even without counting subsidiary effects like internal strife and deaths inflected on the continent, death during transport, death during ownership, collapse of African economies, and such.
My passion is more about bringing the stories out from the African continent mixed with the West.
A lot of groups spend their whole cultural and aesthetic identity trying to move away from Africa, which I think is a mistake. One of the reasons I love Cuba and cultures like that is because they’re not trying to move away from their African roots, they’re trying to embrace them. That’s part of the culture.
When a dish works, it works for everyone, whether you’re Asian, European, African, American or anybody else.
I base myself in African-derived music. Blues is one of the modern forms of African music.
I believe in supporting African solutions to African problems.
When you do a film, you know you’re shooting for 6 or 9 weeks, you’ve got your cast and crew. Overall, no one can just pull the plug and say, ‘This isn’t working.’ There’s just no security on television, especially for African Americans. It’s a tough market.
I loved ‘Ghana Must Go’ by Taiye Selasi. It’s about a first-generation African family living in America that has to return home to Nigeria when their estranged father passes away.
There’s this idea that at the lowest rungs of the social ladder in an African family is a childless woman – and the lowest rung of all is a motherless child.
Mandela was chosen as a symbol of the South African struggle, and he did that great. But I wasn’t just happy for him. I was happy for the people.
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.
The working-class Africans are not doing very well, and one of the problems is their education is so shocking. It is routinely said it is a result of apartheid. Deliberately, black people were not allowed to know too much. They could read and write a bit to be useful, but that’s about it.
As a youngster, my parents made me aware that all that was from the African Diaspora belonged to me. So I came in with Caribbean music, African music, Latin music, gospel music and blues.
The world owes an ecological debt to the African continent.
The expropriation of land without compensation is envisaged as one of the measures that we will use to accelerate redistribution of land to black South Africans.
Perhaps if we all subscribed to the African concept of Ubuntu – that we all become people through other people, and that we cannot be fully human alone, we could learn a lot. There’d be less hatred and more harmony.
In the last 20 years of collecting contemporary African art, I have been bombarded by incredible shapes and colors that I now want to translate into clothes.
I’m always telling people baseball needs to be more prominent in the African American community. What a better way to do so, going on these TV shows and appearing on the cover of this or that. Now kids can see how baseball can change your life. Frank Thomas did that for me.
You know, it helps having an African American driver behind the wheel. I’m representing that culture and that background. But a lot of background pressure, I don’t really put that on me. I know I have enough pressure to go out and perform every week.
Democrats did not lose control of the Senate because African Americans did not vote. Actually, as supported by preliminary exit poll data, the complete opposite is the case. African Americans increased as a proportion of the electorate in 2014 over 2010.
Being a white South African, I enjoyed the better things that that country gave to a small percentage of its population.
It’s such a big deal, the notion that these enslaved Africans had marriages and children… because therein lies our humanity, our capacity for love.
The moral and intellectual character of the Africans is widely different in different nations.
I think what happened during the Great Depression was that African Americans understood that Republicans championed citizenship and voting rights but they became impatient for economic emancipation.
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.
Panama’s a really wonderful country. There’s obviously the Panama Canal, which brings a lot of tourism, and a huge American influence; it’s just a mix of so many great things: African, Caribbean, Latin American Spanish, all kinds of influences there.
In my opinion, it would be a lot better for the culture – meaning the culture of America – if there was more diversity in terms of storyline. In terms of the kind of content that you see about Americans of African descent on the screen.
As strong as we are, we have our moments. My mama is an African woman who had four kids and was a nurse for 25 years, and she had her moments. I’ve seen her cry.
My foundation was created so I can find a way to improve the living conditions of my people in the African continent, not just in Congo.
The large ensemble cast and the fact that it was being shot in New York, combined with a lot of strong positive images as far as African Americans are concerned, really turned me on to The Best Man.
As a young African, the sense of opportunity that fills my head on a daily basis is, I suspect, reminiscent of how young Africans felt at the cusp of independence.
I’m proud to be an American. I’m proud to be an African American in America. I’ve had some interesting experiences: some great, some not so great, but I love it here.
Zimbabwe is an unusual case study in African colonialism in that it was invaded by a private company under Royal Charter.
I was raised on African music, Harry Belafonte, and the Boston Pops. Then I got a dose of soul and hip-hop. I related to it immediately.
The richest persons in Africa are heads of state, governors and ministers. So every ‘educated’ African who wants to be rich – and there is nothing wrong with wanting to be rich – heads straight into government or politics.
Delaware State is no longer a college for African Americans without other choices, it is a university of choice.
There is an Islamic population in France, most of which comes from the North African countries.
People identify with me – everyone does – African American women, Caucasian women, they all identify with me because I’m ethnic.
By 1960, the South Africans knew that they were becoming a pariah state.
African leaders work really under severe limitations and constraints.
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.
I am inspired by Nelson Mandela. I was a volunteer teacher in South Africa during apartheid, where I witnessed his success liberating black South Africans.
No country in Europe has a larger proportion of men and women of immigrant descent, mainly from the African continent and mainly Muslim: an estimated six to seven million of them, or more than 10% of the population.
We still have to create things for African American women. Just like Tyler Perry is doing it, we can’t wait for things to happen; you have to go and make and create roles and go to people.
In short, we have, among African countries, a duty of solidarity.
I think that there are some people on the so-called Left who might say we have to circle our wagons around the first African American president, and to me that is racism in reverse because his policies are actually still the racist policies of empire.
Franschhoek – French Corner – is a place which serves South Africans as a kind of sophisticated fantasy, an alternative version of what life could be. The small town is enclosed by wild mountains, at this time of year blue and dusty green.
Mugabe’s become a disgrace to Africa. And I must say this because I am an African and a lot of us looked up to him back in the 1980s when he was the liberation hero. But he’s now turned himself into a murderous despot.
I’ve made it my mission to make movies starring African American actors and about the African American experience and put them in the mainstream. They’re very universal stories I’ve told – every movie I’ve done.
History teaches us that unity is strength, and cautions us to submerge and overcome our differences in the quest for common goals, to strive, with all our combined strength, for the path to true African brotherhood and unity.
I know exactly what I will do. I will go and work with the Congress of South African Students.
As we women know, there are so many other hurdles that we have to cross that I would love it if we could stop having the race conversation so that we can get women further on. You know, a female president now that we have an African American president. Maybe we can get an Asian female, a gay person?
Music is an expression of who you are, and – at least in that sense – I think I epitomize Black Lives Matter. I’m a big black man, and I’m easily misunderstood. Before I started wearing these African clothes, people would assume that I was a threat and that it was O.K. to be violent toward me.
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.
I used to work in the cotton fields a lot when I was young. There were a lot of African Americans working out there. A lot of Mexicans – the blacks and the whites and the Mexicans, all out there singing, and it was like an opera in the cotton fields, and I can still hear it in the music that I write and play today.
It was cool to play an African princess who’s the smartest in the whole world. That never happens. So I hope all the young girls can feel smart, too.
Art is a form of experience of the person, the place, the history of the people, and as black people, we are different. We hail from Africa to America, so the culture is mixed, from the African to the American. We can’t drop that. It’s reflected in the music, the dance, the poetry, and the art.
I’ll make a general comment about this whole dependence on ‘celebrities.’ I object to this situation as it is right now, where they have inadvertently or manipulatively become the spokespeople for the African continent.
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.
I remember when I first came to America, nobody had a clue what a black Englishman was. I was either South African or Australian to them.
I have strong views about South African politics and I still don’t feel I need to make public statements.
I am famous because I am an African American jazz artist.
My parents shared not only an improbable love, they shared an abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation. They would give me an African name, Barack, or blessed, believing that in a tolerant America your name is no barrier to success.
We can now have action movies with two stars where one might be African American and one might be Asian American. One of them doesn’t have to be white, and the other one doesn’t have to be the ethnic sidekick. We’re way over that. And I think it’s happening in society, too.
I have an African gray parrot; her name is Eli. We thought she was a boy. And a blue-streaked lory named Marco. He’s 10. And a yellow and green parakeet, Petey. He’s very cute, but he’s getting old.
I created the Dikembe Mutombo Foundation back in 1997 for the purpose of going in and improving the living conditions of my people on the African continent, especially in the Democratic Republic of Congo where I came from. Out first mission was to go and build a new hospital. Our next mission was to build a school.
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.
There’s a glorious sense of freedom in comedy, just allowing myself to tell jokes, allowing myself to interrupt myself and tell old African folk stories that I made up – or didn’t – and Jamaican stories.
I think I would like to see more roles for South Asian performers that are more inclusive and part of the American Diaspora, the American tapestry, perhaps the way that African American and Hispanic roles have developed.
Many, many people of the Revolutionary generation, the generation that fought in the Revolutionary War, understood that slavery was somehow in contradiction to what America was saying it was. And many of those folks also, at the very least, gave land to African Americans when they were liberated.
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.’
Football is a personal interest which has been turned into a philanthropic initiative directed at encouraging social cohesion during the difficult process of African modernisation.
Hardest of all for Europeans to negotiate are traditional African religions, whose transactions with unseen powers are central to the running of life in many areas, the main weapon in the struggle against the forces of evil.
I always said if I had a platform to speak, I am going to speak. I feel it is just important, not only for African American-related things but world things in general.
I started photographing amazing African wildlife for my own pleasure. It was like a much-needed antidote to my life in the city, which I was fast becoming allergic to.
A lot of African Americans, especially men, deal with this as a part of life. I’ve been pulled over by the police in my life, and I think I’ve only gotten a ticket once. It’s just a part of everyday life, and it doesn’t matter if you’re in the car with your children or by yourself.
Many people believe that determining who is ‘black’ is rather easy, a task simplified by the administration of the one-drop rule. Under the one-drop rule, any discernible African ancestry stamps a person as ‘black.’
We inadvertently keep oppressing Africans when we label them by an approximated color – and even when we confuse a specific socio-cultural group such as the Afro-Americans with Africans.
My African roots made me what I am today. They’re the reason I exist at all.
Asian Americans are the same as African American, Hispanic Americans, anyone: we deserve to be respected, too.
The most valuable blacks are those in prison, those who have the warrior spirit, who had a sense of being African. They got for their women and children what they needed when all other avenues were closed to them.
I am very good with dialects, but the two that I can’t do for some reason are the South African and Australian.
There’s a similarity between European and North African folk musics.
Improving Africa’s farming sector would have multiple positive outcomes for African people.
Irish Americans are no more Irish than Black Americans are Africans.
Cassius Clay is a name that white people gave to my slave master. Now that I am free, that I don’t belong anymore to anyone, that I’m not a slave anymore, I gave back their white name, and I chose a beautiful African one.
My mother is half-French, half-Malagasy, so I’ve been listening to African music, like Malian and Congolese music, since I was a child.
A small child from a developing country has the advantage, from a very early age, of having access to toys which structure his mind, which constitute a sure advantage over the little African child who has never even held a modern toy.
The Asiatics and the Africans, such as the Russians, the Arabs, the Hindus, are increasing with marked rapidity. Never have the European races been in such great peril as today.
Many African leaders refuse to send their troops on peace keeping missions abroad because they probably need their armies to intimidate their own populations.
If I were to call it black music, that would be untrue. I don’t know what that is, unless it would be some African drums or something.
I think all of my writing life led up to the writing of ‘The Train Driver’ because it deals with my own inherited blindness and guilt and all of what being a white South African in South Africa during those apartheid years meant.
Outside’ was more of a personal project. This, the ‘African Giant’, is more of an African project.
First of all, the music that people call Latin or Spanish is really African. So Black people need to get the credit for that.
Tanzania sells about 50 million pounds of coffee a year to coffee-shop chains such as Starbucks and Peet’s. But Sweet Unity is the only finished, branded product from the East African country to be sold directly in the U.S.
African American children can’t be educationally disadvantaged for 12 years and then experience a miracle cure when it comes time for admission into college.
I think the Congolese music is more important in the African community that Rwandan. You know, Rwanda is not musically really important in Africa. It’s interesting, of course. But Congolese rumba was so huge in Africa that everybody was inspired by it.
There is, for me, as a black woman, as an African woman, a sense of possibility in America that I don’t feel when I’m in Europe.
My dad is Caucasian, and my mom is African American. I’m half black and half white. Being biracial paints a blurred line that is equal parts staggering and illuminating.
The perception of linked fate and that feeling of being always on the spot as a representative of the race, at least in mixed company, are features of African American life that predate affirmative action and arise outside of its presence.
I just had a normal African childhood; we played football a lot, but it was always in the street and always without shoes. Boots were very expensive, and when there are seven in your family, and you say you want to buy a pair, your father wants to kill you.
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.
Usually, I’ll be auditioning for the third lead, and there will be Latina actresses, Indian actresses, African American actresses because it will be like, ‘Let’s check off this box. We have our lead white girl, and we need an ethnic slot.’
African American history is really American history because African Americans really helped build this country.
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.
The names of Dingane and Bambata, Hintsa and Makana, Squngthi and Dalasile, Moshoeshoe and Sekhukhuni, were praised as the glory of the entire African nation. I hoped then that life might offer me the opportunity to serve my people and make my own humble contribution to their freedom struggle.
Shakespeare is in many ways an African writer and ‘Hamlet’ would be seen as a very accurate historical saga about an African kingdom.
Creating a body of mathematics is about intellectual labor, not some kind of transcendental revelation. There are plenty of important components of European fractal geometry that are missing from the African version.
If African film makers had one-tenth the amount commanded by film makers the world over – even the amount used by so-called shoestring film makers – I think we would see quite an explosion of African films on the world scene.
The African mind has a lot to contribute, not only to world understanding of the arts, but to an understanding of spiritualism. That is the contribution Africa will make to the world of the future – an injection of sanity into the environment of the universe itself.
There is no living African writer who has not had to, or will not have to, contend with Achebe’s work. We are either resisting him – stylistically, politically, or culturally – or we are writing toward him.
Tracing, freezing, and return of stolen assets has proved in many cases to be exceptionally difficult for most African countries.
We believe that African football is among the best in the world and very much characterized the Puma brand mentality, which is to win.
What do I bring to a film? I think, maybe, I know for a fact that I focus on connection of character; I focus on warmth and a heart, but I don’t know if it’s because I’m African American or because I’m crazy -who knows.
I was born in Evanston, about three blocks away from the Chicago border. My mother, at the time, was finishing her Ph.D. in African History at Northwestern University. Soon after my birth, my parents split, and my father moved to Wicker Park, which is on the north side of the city.
Really, the potential for, first of all, any college graduate today is enormously good. These are good times for anyone with a college degree today, particularly African Americans. With a college degree today, you really breach the unemployment rate.
Most Africans don’t get to see these wild animals at all. Once they see and learn about them, they are much more likely to become involved in protecting the environment.
The history of the African American community is one of enduring, relentless struggle with a vision of accepting nothing less than full social and economic equality.
Most African Americans, especially the men and women from my generation, would accept the nationalist gambit that says only European Americans can be racists, which is an interesting gambit.
Whites, like ourselves, belong to our country. They are compatriots, fellow citizens… we see them as Africans.
If we can provide even a fictional roadmap to what a successful, prosperous African nation might look like, then let’s do that.
As long as white people put people of color, African Americans and Latinos, in the same dispensable bag, and look at our children of color as insignificant and treat women of color as not as deserving of protection as white women, we will never achieve true equality.
I don’t think my background in Zambia has really affected my lens because my classical training has been Western-style. But it’s fantastically fortuitous to have been born African because I don’t feel I have a vested interest to the U.S. or China or wherever.
The face of the eviction epidemic is moms and kids, especially poor moms from predominantly Latino and African American neighborhoods.
Oddly enough, Asians are a much smaller ‘minority’ than African Americans in this country. But because Asians are so successful, college admission officers don’t feel sorry for them, so they are not a preferred ‘minority.’
I changed my name when we became aware of the African revolution and the whole question of our African roots.
After Nigeria, we are the second biggest black African nation. We are the headquarters of the African Union. We are the only African country that has never been colonized. This is perhaps the last surviving African civilization.
If people feel misled or deceived, then sorry that they feel that way, but I believe that’s more due to their definition and construct of race in their own minds than it is to my integrity or honesty, because I wouldn’t say I’m African American, but I would say I’m black, and there’s a difference in those terms.
You draw a district for that particular minority – African American, Asian, Hispanic – so those folks have the right to elect whoever they want. If they don’t decide to elect someone who sounds like them or looks like them, they can pick anyone they want.
What you have to understand is that blues… it’s in a line from the oldest forms of African music. If you’re playing it like it’s an echo of the past, it would be a lot less exciting, but this music lives today.
In 1967 I entered Harvard as a freshman, confident – in the way that only 17-year-olds are – that I could change the world. My major was African Studies, and my plan was to travel to Tanzania, where President Julius Nyerere was creating a government based on democracy and socialism.
We’re all Africans, everyone – black, white, yellow.
America is not perfect. It took a bloody civil war to free over 4 million African Americans who lived enslaved. It took another hundred years after that before they achieved full equality under the law.
I wrote some bad poetry that I published in North African journals, but even as I withdrew into this reading, I also led the life of a kind of young hooligan.
Liberal whites are the greatest enemy of African Americans.
One thing that sticks in my mind is that jazz means freedom and openness. It’s a music that, although it developed out of the African American experience, speaks more about the human experience than the experience of a particular people.
In American culture at large, but especially in African American culture, it’s a sign of weakness to ask for help.
I am convening the African Leaders Forum on Disability in partnership with Special Olympics so that a marginalized population long unrecognized does not remain in the shadows. I consider this a critical, moral and practical challenge.
When I got out of acting school, I was lucky to have gotten any job at all. A lot of people hiring African American actresses – it was right after ‘Roots,’ and for society, not me, it was great. Nice richly dark-skinned people was the fashion, and I was not.
I get so tickled when that pilot happens to be an African American because I rarely see that. The same is true when I go to find restaurants. I mean, most places I go, I kind of have some idea who the chef is, which is why I want to go.
The humanity that is given to other people isn’t given to us. There is an expendability that comes along with being African American.
The best thing we can do is give students the tools for constructing their own identities – powerful new tools like African fractals – and then just get out of the way.
We say that the ICC is targeting Africans, but all of the victims in our cases in Africa are African victims.
I think there is a big difference between expressing the pain and anger that many African Americans and other people of color may feel versus language that I think now crosses the line and goes into hate.
I have run two Olympic ‘A’ standard times over the past 12 months and with the time I ran at the African Championships last week I know my speed and fitness are constantly improving so that I will peak in time for the Olympics.
I was able to do To Sleep with Anger, a very powerful film about African Americans, their spirituality, and the things that happened within a small community and a family.
The rise of African nations concurrent with the spread of the Nation of Islam and the civil rights movement gave black America a burst of pride over and above anything they had had since the decline of the movement of Marcus Garvey.
In every generation and in every intellectual sphere and in every political moment, there have been African American women who have articulated the need to think and talk about race through a lens that looks at gender or think and talk about feminism through a lens that looks at race.
We must never forget that Black History is American History. The achievements of African Americans have contributed to our nation’s greatness.
I am a musician by rights, and I played in Asbury Park in the old African Room in the Robert Trent Hotel next to the Albion. That was in the early ’60s.
There are probably more annoying things than being hectored about African development by a wealthy Irish rock star in a cowboy hat, but I can’t think of one at the moment.
Winning an official World Cup with the South African team had become my burning ambition.
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.
There’s still racism. Western Europe… has taken the native cultures of the Americas, the African cultures, the Asian civilization and lumped them together into The Others.
I am convinced the next major attack against the United States may well be conducted by people with Asian or African faces, not the ones that many Americans are alert to.
I am an African. I live there and my children live there, and as far as I understand, they intend to go on living there.
In 1985, I was arrested, along with my mother and brother, Martin III, in a protest against apartheid at the South African Embassy in Washington, D.C.
Geography was the lesson I always looked forward to most. It was a form of escapism. It could be bleak midwinter outside but inside you’re learning about African farming methods or the Great Lakes. No other lesson had that excitement.
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.
In 1985 I graduated from Deshler High School in Tuscumbia, Alabama, and I was their first African American homecoming queen. You would have thought I won Miss America or Miss U.S.A. (wink), because of my excitement.
African Americans make up about 13 percent of the U.S. population but comprise 32 percent of patients treated for kidney failure, giving them a kidney failure rate that is 4.2 times greater than that of white Americans.
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.
Mbeki began to write a study of the workings of apartheid policy in the reserves – the areas set aside in law for African occupation – as early as 1959 and 1960.
I remember talking to old-school African American grandpops, and they’re just like, ‘When I saw my wife, I looked up from across the street, and I said, ‘That girl gon’ be my wife someday.’ And we’ve been married 45 years.’ Like, what? That’s all it took?
What we are trying to do now, this new generation of African writers, is to write about what it is to be a human being living in a particular African country. These are stories that resonate with anyone, anywhere.
The thing people have to remember is there’s nothing natural about racism as it exists in America. I mean, we know this historically. We can look at 1619, when Africans first came here, and how early African slaves intermixed pretty indiscriminately with indentured white servants.
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.
I rebel at the notion that I can’t be part of other groups, that I can’t construct identities through elective affinity, that race must be the most important thing about me. Is that what I want on my gravestone: Here lies an African American?
I first heard African drum rhythms and chants at the movies. Then, when I had the opportunity to go to Africa and visit the villages, I heard the real, raw, true rhythms and realised the origins of the old Negro spirituals I grew up with in the South.
The diversity lottery program is a proven method of offering a path to legal permanent status for residents of African nations and other underrepresented regions seeking a better life here in the United States.
It’s troubling that by eliminating weekend voting hours, the state of Ohio specifically banned a popular voting time of choice for minorities. In Cuyahoga County, which I represent, 56 percent of weekend voters in 2008 were African American while adult African Americans comprise 28 percent of the county population.
The power of Haitian heritage and the strength of the Haitian people is tremendous. And Haiti holds a unique and rich role in the history of African Americans.
When you walk into a room, and you’re the only one of something – the only woman or the only African American – that immediate feeling of loneliness happens.
I was well known to African Americans before Bill Clinton discovered me. He was like Christopher Columbus riding up on something he didn’t understand.
The mentality with African and European people is different. In Africa, when you come from a difficult life, when it’s not so easy to eat, not so easy to survive, you respect money when you start to earn it, and you respect people more. When you respect people, they will respect you, and your life is better for that.
For me, growing up as an activist under an oppressive dictatorship in Uganda, the U.N. was a friend to those of us who fought our way to freedom, as it was for the millions who joined decolonization struggles in the African continent.
I’m not British. I’m not American. I’m not French. Whatever thing they practise, that is their business. I am an African. I am Rwandese.
We view South Africa as one of our closest strategic partners in the developing world and in the African continent.
I had a hard time convincing students that they were going to North Africa to understand the North Africans, not to understand themselves.
As an ambiguously non-white actor, I’ve been able to play light-skinned African American guys, Latinos, and I don’t think that I’ve ever had to play some kind of ethnic stereotype or something that was typed specifically for a person of color.
I knew I was in charge when with the ball. But on the toughest defenders I faced, I would say that my African brothers were the ones. We have the same mentality and thought the same way. Osei Kuffour was the toughest of them all.
I don’t do stuff to be a star. I do it because I feel it’s important for kids, African American kids, to see an African American face that plays baseball.
My brother and I were brought up sort of thinking that we were English. I remember hearing the poet Roy Campbell on the radio and being quite shocked that he had a South African accent. I didn’t know there were any South African poets.
I always ask the question: As more Africans are going online, are they finding content that is meaningful and relevant to them, or are they just consuming from everywhere else. As Africans, we have the capacity to generate our own content.
Many African smallholder farmers did not share in the ‘green revolution’ productivity gains driven by modern seeds and techniques, irrigation, and greater fertilizer use in Asia and Latin America in the 1960s.
Too many African countries have already hit rock-bottom – ungoverned, poverty-stricken, and lagging further and further behind the rest of the world each day; there is nowhere further to go down.
We know African and Asian elephants can interbreed, and they’re separated by 5 million to 6 million years.
Africans are on the front lines of humanitarian efforts, distributing life-saving aid in dangerous environments. Africans comprise the vast majority of peacekeepers in civil conflict on that continent. Africans for the most part lead peace negotiations for the wars being fought in Africa.
Many Africans succumb to the idea that they can’t do things because of what society says. Images of Africa are negative – war, corruption, poverty. We need to be proud of our culture.
Africans don’t just need more jobs: they need better jobs.
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.
I had been an activist on the issue of HIV, primarily in the African American and Latino communities here in the U.S. for many years. It was horrifying to me how the pandemic was raging right here in this country but no one was talking about it.
If African countries can unite and pull resources together, then that will be the best thing we could ever do for the problems in Africa including AIDS.
During the days of segregation, there was not a place of higher learning for African Americans. They were simply not welcome in many of the traditional schools. And from this backward policy grew the network of historical black colleges and universities.
Have you seen any African American athlete that appeals to the urban market actually bring that market to the MMA?
Our African ancestors were the first to engage in breathing. By that logic, I think by breathing today, we are engaging in cultural appropriation of the first Homo sapiens. And so the only way I will ask you to stop being racist is to suffocate – to stop breathing.
My mama is African American and from Wisconsin. My baba was born in Iran. My parents have stressed the idea of creating your own path, and creating your own identity is part of that. That’s why embracing these two cultures is important to me.
Like most Africans, I had to work much harder and show much deeper belief than others.
I can do an hour-long speech about Democrats taking African Americans for granted, and I’d have a line behind me of very prominent African-Americans who would say, ‘Amen.’
The black immigrant experience in the U.S. must be understood not in contrast to the African American experience but as an integral part of it.
We as African Americans knew that if we wanted to see change, we had to step up to the plate and make that change ourselves. Not everyone comes to that realization in their lives, but thank God Linda Brown’s father felt that way.
It would be good for us Africans to accept ourselves as we are and recapture some of the positive aspects of our culture.
Donald intends to represent all the people, not just some of the people. That includes Christians and Jews and Muslims; it includes Hispanics and African Americans and Asians, and the poor and the middle-class. Throughout his career, Donald has successfully worked with people of many faiths and with many nations.
I think it is so great right now that we are in an age where there’s an African American president in office. I think it is important for our generation to really witness that.
What I’m trying to do, in my own small way, is trying to bring African and Afro-Cuban rhythms into rock.
I realized quickly what Mandela and Tambo meant to ordinary Africans. It was a place where they could come and find a sympathetic ear and a competent ally, a place where they would not be either turned away or cheated, a place where they might actually feel proud to be represented by men of their own skin color.
Unilever brings together the resources and experience of a multinational company alongside our deep local roots, which enables us to grow a genuinely African consumer goods business.
I’m the best goal-scorer in the history of the African Cup.
I had a fascination with the roots of African American music. That would have been my first education in music. I had a real passion for it. I wanted to play it, sing it. I could sing at a young age, but I started to teach myself bass guitar and started writing when I was 15.
When you talk about evangelicals, don’t forget that a significant proportion of the evangelical community is African American. And most African Americans – well over 90 percent, thoroughly evangelical, thoroughly biblical – will probably vote Democratic.
The ‘Cheetah Generation’ refers to the new and angry generation of young African graduates and professionals, who look at African issues and problems from a totally different and unique perspective.
The Fela Kuti Queens – the band members and wives of the late African musician Fela Anikulapo Kuti – are my fashion icons.
Culturally, it is commonplace for African women to work.
I’m an immigrant writer, or an African writer, or an Ethiopian-American writer, and occasionally an American writer according to the whims and needs of my interpreters.
What we are oftentimes reminding people of is the fact that the history of police in the U.S. was that they were slave patrols. They were quite literally created in order to capture enslaved Africans.
I learned about Chinese ceramics and African sculptures, I aired my scanty knowledge of the French Impressionists, and I prospered.
In the African American community, we are very ‘hush, hush’ about things in our life.
African countries lose the most from tax dodging. African governments must, therefore, do more to push for a full reform of the global tax system and demand action from countries, such as the U.K., whose financial centres sit at the heart of the global network of tax havens.
I believe now that I’ve cemented my spot as the best swimmer in the world, and I can’t describe how proud that makes me. I just want to keep working hard and hopefully just inspire more youngsters to keep swimming and encourage South Africans to become a winning nation.
For complicated historical and political reasons, we associate ‘poor’ in our public consciousness with ‘black.’ Terms such as ‘welfare queen’ and ‘culture of poverty’ became associated uniquely with the social maladies of African Americans in urban ghettos, despite the fact that poor whites outnumbered poor blacks.
I had experiences or exposure to music in church. I went to a church, it was very unique. It was a predominantly African American Catholic church. So they would have – one mass would be traditional church music, and then the other mass would be gospel music.
May I suggest that people in many African countries could be suffering from donation fatigue?
When I was a youth, to be called ‘African’ was a diss. At school, the African kids used to lie and say they were Jamaican. So when I first came in the game, and I’m saying lyrics like, ‘I make Nigerians proud of their tribal scars/ My bars make you push up your chest like bras,’ that was a big deal for me.
Once there are more African Americans and Asian Americans behind the scenes as producers, writers, and directors, I think more inclusive casting will happen.
My problem in calling for pressures on South Africa is to convince the youth to convince their governments and people that it is not the South African goods that are cheap, but the forced labor of the Africans.
I’d been told that when you first put your feet on African ground, you’ll be hit by a feeling of overwhelming understanding, like you’ve returned home and suddenly belong. Quite frankly, I didn’t feel that.
Crucially, African governments must ensure they prioritize the eradication of tax evasion and tax avoidance.
This is the place where anybody – like an African American kid raised by a single mom – can be president.
When we were in D.C. my daddy used to cut his hair with a bowl. Crucial. If you’re African, Haitan, Jamaican or even more poor than the people in the project, you’ll know about that.
I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man, that he’s African American.
Think of all the different features from Asian to African to Aboriginal to Caucasian. But we are all within the same species, Homo Sapiens.
What we forget is that African Americans made the largest contribution to America, economically, before the Civil War of any sector of society. I read that the railroads were worth about $2 billion, but slavery was a $3 billion asset.
If men wanted to look good in a skirt, they would need the body of an African. And the colour. A skirt with white, skinny legs. Horrible!
My new mission is, and I’ve said this to the White House, I want the Buy America to be real. I want the Buy America to be by small businesses, African American businesses, Latino and Asian, but in particular our African American businesses who heretofore couldn’t even find the front door of government contracts.
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.
I’d already decided I wanted to design shoes after I saw a sign in the Museum of African and Oceanic Art forbidding high heels. Well, who could resist?
Our most polluted neighborhoods are disproportionately home to Latinos, African Americans, and other communities of color.
Being a white southern African who saw the transition from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe, the sense of being an outsider was absolutely instilled in my limbic system.
I am an African and I am very proud of that.
Housing programs designed to help young families and senior citizens purchase homes should be available to people of all races, including African Americans.
Governments around the world are looking for economic growth and job creation. African economies are no exception, with increasing recognition that growth has to be built on a more diversified economic structure in order to make a lasting contribution to development.
I grew up in the ’50s, a tough time for African Americans. I had friends whose fathers would openly say, ‘Just bite your tongu;, don’t cause any problems.’ My father was not like that. Even in the toughest times racially, if somebody disrespected his family, they were in trouble.
You’re a white South African, and right away you have to explain yourself. Occasionally, I get hassled until I explain my point of view. I have to make it clear that I don’t live there anymore, and I don’t approve of the brutal racial policies.
When you’ve got African parents, you go to uni, do finance, and go into accounting. But I’m not good with systems. I dropped out in my final year of college to become a Christian poet. Then went back to do my A-levels and went to uni in Birmingham to do political science and theology. I lasted 12 weeks.
With a foreign policy appropriately rooted in some sense of humanitarian decency, the Central African crisis will not be easily ignored by American policymakers. It screams for remedy.
I read recently that the problem with stereotypes isn’t that they are inaccurate, but that they’re incomplete. And this captures perfectly what I think about contemporary African literature. The problem isn’t that it’s inaccurate, it’s that it’s incomplete.
Every intelligent person whose life has been passed in a slaveholding State, and who has carefully observed the character and capacity of the African race, will see that a general and sudden emancipation would be absolute ruin to the Negroes, as well as to the white population.
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.
One researcher just determined that African and Indian elephants make each other sick. When a new animal or plant is introduced to a habitat bad things happen. The biggest danger to native wildlife is foreign wildlife.
Of course African teams are underachieving when you think of what their potential is.
Studies of immigration show that this resistance to heart disease is not just something in African or Chinese genes. When people move from low-risk to high-risk areas, disease rates skyrocket as they adopt Western diets and lifestyles.
In the past, I think my films that focused on African subjects struggled in the marketplace because of their subject matter.
So with the young African artists. What they have to learn from tribal art is not how to copy the traditional forms, but the confidence that comes from knowing that somewhere inside them there should be the vitality which enabled their fathers to produce these extraordinary and exciting forms.
Africans need to be kicked, that’s the only thing they understand.
Hollywood needs to recognise all shades of African American beauty.
An African woman carries heavy loads anyway. That’s how we are trained; we are brought up that nothing is unbearable. I use that now, positively. I use that now to have the thick skin that I have, and not fear, and move forward, and push; and push forward.
I’m fanatical about movies: African, European, Viking, Roman. I got into witchcraft and magic from watching ‘Bewitched’ and ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ which shows in some of my outfits. I dress to reflect the whole spectrum of the universe.
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.
For people of color – especially African Americans – the idea that racist cops might frame members of their community is no abstract notion, let alone an exercise in irrational conspiracy theorizing. Rather, it speaks to a social reality about which blacks are acutely aware.
For every African state, like Ghana, where democratic institutions seem secure, there is a Mali, a Cote d’Ivoire, and a Zimbabwe, where democracy is in trouble.
It’s obvious that the rest of the world loves high African culture – African culture, period.
Since I was a kid, I inherited my dad’s love for animals and wildlife, even for the ones we had around the house in the French countryside, a ‘smaller’ kind of nature. Then, as I grew up, I looked more deeply into the African continent and its wildlife.
In the past the great majority of minority voters, in Ohio and other places that means African American voters, cast a large percentage of their votes during the early voting process.
One of the things I like best about Netflix is that they make projects like ‘Beasts of No Nation.’ It’s a film about a reality in an African country where kids were being used to be soldiers in a war. And it made so much sense to me as a citizen of the world.
The reason why Botswana has done very well is because it’s the only black African country which went back to its roots and built upon its own indigenous institutions.
For more than 20 years, Camfed has supported a generation of African girls and women with access to secondary and higher education, employment opportunities, and, ultimately, into positions of leadership.
I think a lot of Africans in my generation, and especially those of us who have spent time overseas before coming back, are quite comfortable moving between the two worlds, though always with a lens of, ‘What can we do to help our countries or regions?’
I am totally committed to the cooperation between the African Union and the United Nations.
Miles Davis was a master. In every phase of his career, he understood that this music was a tribute to the African muse.
In the final analysis, the whole cause of world revolution hinges on the revolutionary struggles of the Asian, African and Latin American people who make up the overwhelming majority of the world’s population.
The United States spends more money on African aid than any nation on earth.
She was not a white woman. She was not a Greek… Until the emergence of the doctrine of white superiority, Cleopatra was generally pictured as a distinctly African woman, dark in color.
According to the American Heart Association, the prevalence of hypertension in African Americans in the United States is among the highest in the world.
Among all researchers who have worked in the African field, I consider myself one of the most fortunate because of the privilege of having been able to study the mountain gorilla.
To see, once again, that African American students are more likely to have a limited math curriculum and an underpaid novice teacher is disheartening and should be a call to action for policymakers and educators.
When I was15 years old, I couldn’t look at the NFL and look on TV and say, ‘Boy, there’s a head coach, African American. That’s something I’d like to do.’
You know, rap is sort of like a form of talking, right? So it’s like you can hear, you know, the slaves doing it. You can hear, like, you know, Africans and Jamaicans doing it just kind of as, like, a rhythmic, poetic conversation, you know, to a rhythm.
The relationship between France and its ‘foreign’ players – blacks and North African Arabs – has always been troubled, particularly with Algerians.
It appears that the present-day form of African American English is not the inheritance of the period of slavery, but the creation of the second half of the 20th century.
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.
White liberals are the most racist people I’ve ever met in my entire life. They define everything by race. They want people to be able to get into college with lower grades and lower school scores simply because they are African American. That’s insane.
The first book I wrote was The Bride Price which was a romantic book, but my husband burnt the book when he saw it. I was the typical African woman, I’d done this privately, I wanted him to look at it, approve it and he said he wouldn’t read it.
If African farmers can use improved seeds and better practices to grow more crops and get them to market, then millions of families can earn themselves a better living and a better life.
Michael Schultz’s ‘Cooley High’ is a classic. Oftentimes, we don’t get to see films about coming of age, especially for young African Americans.
Growing up South African, I was comparatively in a world of privilege, especially being the youngest and being figuratively wrapped up in cotton wool by the rest of the family.
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.
I like African music, and I’m a huge Ravi Shankar fan.
Nobody can come and develop Africa on behalf of Africans.
I use a 1994 South African 5 rand coin to mark my ball. It reminds me of my ’94 U.S. Open win at Oakmont.
The Africans know I’m not an African. I’m an American.
I don’t believe that the fight for trans rights or African American rights is different from the fight against war, or the fight for refugees.
I want women and girls of African descent and of color to be able to not have to keep searching for stories about themselves.
African American women in particular have incredible buying power. Statistically, we go to the movies more than anyone. We have made Tyler Perry’s career. His films open with $25 million almost consistently.
The last four or five hundred years of European contact with Africa produced a body of literature that presented Africa in a very bad light and Africans in very lurid terms. The reason for this had to do with the need to justify the slave trade and slavery.
Thousands of years ago, civilizations flourished in Africa which suffer not at all by comparison with those of other continents. In those centuries, Africans were politically free and economically independent. Their social patterns were their own and their cultures truly indigenous.
I made a lot of friends at school, and they were all Africans. I could have felt very different. I didn’t feel different, I didn’t notice the color of their skin, I didn’t notice the color of my skin and I have remembered that all my life.
The Civil Rights for Musicians Act is about economic justice for African American artists. It’s about what’s right. And it’s about time.
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.
I just want my daughter to grow up in a society where she feels accepted being South African, German and Ukrainian.
When I visited Africa to make my film ‘Music by Prudence,’ I was struck by how intensely religious and socially conservative Africans were. There was literally a church on every corner.
The African people and tribal chiefs are hospitable, and African music and dances are invigorating.
If you were asking me how it is to be a Muslim in America, it’s much harder to be a North African in France than to be a foreigner here in America.
From time to time, there are people in the film industry who appear on the horizon with a unique vision. South African director Neill Blomkamp is one of those rare people.
Even in the United States, the enslavement of African descendants continued until the presidency of Abraham Lincoln. That brutal form of slavery was abolished there hardly thirty years before it was abolished in Cuba.
Respectfully, the civil rights movement for people with disabilities is modeled on the African American civil rights movement. I’m old enough to remember 1964. I was a junior in high school.
Some heat, some spice and plenty of citrus are the building blocks of many North African fish dishes.
I can see quite clearly that if there was a single event that launched me on the road to ultimate involvement at the heart of South African politics, it was an assault on an African woman by her white employer in a kitchen in Fort Hare.
The art, the greatness of the music, the experience of the music is what I’m about. I think most African artists have destroyed their artistry by commercialization, and I don’t want to belong to that bag.
One of the biggest things I understood in a program like that was that it allowed more young African American scholars to do field research in the Caribbean and in Africa than had ever happened before in the history of the country and since.
The Chinese, the African, and the European – they are all there. So the division of the Caribbean experience into being emphatically only African is absurd.
Europe became rich because it exploited Africa; and the Africans know that.
More than just a zoo, the Animal Kingdom is an extraordinary experience of animals, rides and performances. The exhibits have the scale and creativity you associate with Disney. The African safari ride is terrific and worth riding several times.
Epidemics historically have tended to kill the very young and the very old, but AIDS is different: Those ages 20 to 40 are most affected, which means that so far over 12 million African children have been orphaned because of AIDS.
Morals are in all countries the result of legislation and government; they are not African or Asian or European: they are good or bad.
Policing has never been about public safety: its origins are rooted in social control, the denial of people’s human rights, securing the U.S. borders, recapturing escaped, enslaved Africans, and upholding racist, homophobic, and transphobic laws.
Much of the foundation of our criminal justice system is derived from slave patrols and was created when African Americans could still be bought, sold, and traded.
I like to listen to African music; I like to listen to Brazilian music that’s not just Choro. I love to listen to Radiohead, I like to listen to James Brown – any music.
I do want to be a representative of the African community, and I want to hold myself and dress myself in a way that reflects that. I want black kids to see me and think, ‘Okay, he’s carrying himself as a black man, and that’s how a black man should carry himself.’
After decades of persistent, courageous advocacy – often at risk to their own lives, livelihoods, and safety – African Americans succeeded in securing their right to a voice in our government, and their work laid the foundation for the social justice work of generations to follow.
‘Pretty Deadly’ is the story of these immortal and mortal characters, and the mortals’ story follows Sarah’s family, a black family, through the ages. I never made the choice of, ‘Oh, this is gonna be the story of an African American family!’
I think my track record speaks for myself… I have been endorsed by the African Union, but I am a prosecutor for 121 states parties and this is what I intend to be until the end of my mandate.
The African is my brother but he is my younger brother by several centuries.
I should confess that I’m woefully under-read in South African fiction.
The highest percentage of African Americans own their own homes today than ever in our nation’s history.
Indians were here first – it’s about time. We’re way behind the African Americans and Hispanic Americans in getting politically involved, but we’re beginning to take a page out of their notebook.
As an African American actress, there are people who have been staples in my life that opened a door that I can walk through. I hope that I can have that impact.
The reason why I wear gold – I wear gold for three reasons. One, when Jesus was born, three wise men came from the east: one brought frankincense, one brought myrrh, the other one brought gold. The second reason I wear gold is I can afford it. The third reason I wear it, it’s symbolic of my African heritage.
I think there’s no way of avoiding the South African or African influence from coming into my music, just because I spent 19 years of my life there. Being a kid, my early musical experiences were there.
I realized that you cannot think European and want to write or create something African. You have to think African in everything.
I’m Nigerian. I’m African. I have a lot to say. Apart from what I say, though, is the feeling. People can relate to that feeling. It’s a reciprocal relationship. They feed off me and I feed off them.
I would love to take a cooking class from Gandhi. Maybe I could teach him how to cook, and he could teach me his message. I wouldn’t mind learning how to make couscous from scratch from a North African woman, either.
It takes time for brown people and people of different ethnicities to get into the Hollywood world, which is predominantly Caucasian and African American.
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.
Historically Black Colleges and Universities, or HBCUs, have played an important role in enriching the lives of not just African Americans, but our entire country.
As a South African, the idea of turkey was new to me. And confusing. It’s about the least flavorful bird on the planet.
I’m trying to tell you that there’s a new wave on the continent. A new wave of openness and democratization in which, since 2000, more than two-thirds of African countries have had multi-party democratic elections. Not all of them have been perfect, or will be, but the trend is very clear.
I say that I represent this movement because my intellectual allegiances are clearly European, not African.
A way to make new music is to imagine looking back at the past from a future and imagine music that could have existed but didn’t. Like East African free jazz, which as far as I know does not exist.
The number of African Americans in Silicon Valley is dismal. It’s not up to one company – it’s up to the entire industry to make sure that we are moving the conversation forward. Sometimes those walls of competition need to come down so we can move the entire industry forward.
I don’t play too much into the color game, because I don’t want to be the best African American quarterback, I want to be the best quarterback.
Chermoula is a potent North African spice paste that is ideal for smearing on your favourite vegetables for roasting.
To prevent the death of mothers across our country, we must expand research, implement researched best practices, and fiercely work to understand why African American, Hispanic, and Native American mothers die at even higher rates than white mothers.
I wanted Luke Cage to very much be an African American superhero rather than a superhero that happens to be black. I felt it was important to give him that cultural grounding but also show that it doesn’t make him an obtuse or one-sided character.
We must investigate without fear or favour the so-called ‘accounting irregularities’ that cause turmoil in the markets and wipe billions off the investments of ordinary South Africans.
The thing that is being lost is heritage. In Africa, religion and advertisement and television and media hype have gotten Africans to where they are convinced psychologically that their own heritage is heathen, pagan, barbaric, savage, primitive.
I love African American women, but I just don’t like my skin complexion.
I am half Puerto Rican, a quarter German and a quarter black. That was always a big issue for me – being mixed race – because casting directors tended to be very like, ‘OK, are you Hispanic for this role?’ ‘Or is she going to be African American?’
The U.S. has taken an active role in wars from Libya to the Central African Republic, sent special ops forces into countries from Somalia to South Sudan, conducted airstrikes and abduction missions, even put boots on the ground in countries where it pledged it would not.
To me, Harlem is one of the most important places on the earth, particularly when it comes to talking about African Americans.
My husband is actually biracial. He is Caucasian and African American. And my brother’s fiance is Latina. So we have a colorful family.
We wish to ensure that young Africans do not feel disorientated in the century in which they live.
It is of great concern that the fabric of African life, its very source of hope and stability, is threatened by divorce, abortion, prostitution, human trafficking, and a contraception mentality.
Now I’ve devoted my life to making sure that I can be a trailblazer for any other African American kids or any other gay kids or any other kids that just feel weird or uncomfortable and have their own issues and don’t know how to express themselves. I want to be like a beacon for those kids now.
People used to call me names, so my mom had this beautiful African lady come talk to me.
I believe that there is a God, and coming from an African tradition, I believe also that there are gods.
Being the only African American at this level in American Ballet Theater, I feel like people are looking at me, and it’s my responsibility for me to do whatever I can to provide these opportunities in communities to be able to educate them.
The Legislature, which was elected under the Constitution framed and supported by colored men, declared that a man having more than an eighth of African blood in his veins was ineligible to office or a seat in the Legislature of the State of Georgia.
It’s important to debunk the myths of Africa being this benighted continent civilized only when white people arrived. In fact, Africans had been creators of culture for thousands of years before. These were very intelligent, subtle and sophisticated people, with organized societies and great art.
I love writing for other actors, women of African descent and people who are generally underrepresented.
The good and bad are all tangled up together. American popular music is loved around the world because of its African rhythm. But that wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t for slavery.
I remember, growing up, it wasn’t sexy to be African. We got called names.
We need to hire more black police officers in this country because these are good jobs, and African Americans should have their fair share of good jobs. But we shouldn’t do it because we think that’s going to change policing. We have to push for police reform in other ways.
Before I started LimoLand, I mainly bought my clothes in Harlem, where I found clothing my size in fun colors. I still like to go there and see the vibrancy and colors of the neighborhood. I am also very influenced by the colors of my contemporary African and Japanese art collections.
In ‘Bayou Magic,’ I write about African goddess-mermaids who accompanied slaves to America.
We don’t intend to always keep this necessarily African oriented. Originally I had hoped to have African American Indian of this area, and the Appalachian of this area, but at the same time, just as we have the Haitian room, we will always have room for another exhibit.
I don’t want to not be African. The goal is to live in a world where my race doesn’t limit my access, where I can see myself represented in the highest level of society without any limitation.
The sum total of what I learned about African American culture in school was Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, and the Underground Railroad. This was more than my mom knew; she didn’t even see a black person in real life until she was 18 years old.
What we, as African Americans, stood on was our faith.
Not only do African students deserve excellent universities, they deserve good elementary and secondary schools, too – and then, to have access to ongoing vocational and job training to ensure their skills remain as relevant as possible to African organizations.
‘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.
I’m always very proud of belonging to three minorities: gay, Jewish, white South African.
I look at an ant and I see myself: a native South African, endowed by nature with a strength much greater than my size so I might cope with the weight of a racism that crushes my spirit.
African Americans have always known that a little bit of paranoia was healthy for us.
I like to make bombueti, which is basically the South African national dish. It’s basically a South African curry shepherd’s pie kind of thing.
I have been working for Africans since I was 18, when I got involved with the Nelson Mandela concerts. I got involved with debt cancellation because Desmond Tutu demanded that the world respond to that situation.
We are different from many African countries. We represent Africa as the gateway and will do everything to make African and Israeli relations mushroom.
I want people to say that an African basketball player is the best player in the whole world.
I come from two parts of the oriental community – Jerusalemite and North African Jews.
In some respects, South African apartheid was more vicious than Israeli practices, and in some respects the opposite is true.
Mahatma Gandhi went from Africa to India, and once India won its freedom, it helped African countries to get their independence.
The Dr. King holiday is not just for black people, African-Americans or people of African descent.
An important aspect of the current situation is the strong social reaction against suggestions that the home language of African American children be used in the first steps of learning to read and write.
I don’t believe that the U.S. needs to take a police role. I think it needs to support African nations that have said they want to become a part of the solution.
Genius is an African who dreams up snow.
My son Wesley has just turned 13. He was 12 during the recording of this record and he is quite a drummer already and has been studying drums since he was four, but he’s also very interested in African percussion and studies percussion.
Coming from an African background, obviously the foundation of the family home is education, probably because my parents had to work a lot harder for everything that they’ve got in this country.
I come from an African Caribbean background. I’ve been influenced by a reggae church music style, contemporary gospel, and rock all fused together.
We don’t all have to take the same coordinates to get to the same destination. Being a young African American female artist, I want to open doors for young black girls.
When I became a director, I wanted to convince a very reluctant Sidney into allowing me to go on the journey of his life. Sidney had gone ahead of every other African American actor.
The reason I’m in San Diego is not because I want distance from South Africa but because I want proximity to the people I love. But I don’t envy growing up in America. As ugly as aspects of it were, my biggest blessing was to be born a South African.
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.
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?
I grew up in the African bush in Malawi, Tanzania and Uganda, which is my thing. I love the smell of the dust as you bump along in a Land-Rover. I go back there often.
Sometimes you can’t fight change, because you’re a part of it, and I feel that in the context of these films that are happening now, there is a kind of change coming in terms of how history is represented on film, and the African, and the African-American and British African experience.
‘Revelations’ is one of the most important pieces to the African American arts. It assesses the hope and despair of a people and overcoming the struggle with our faith.
It is African scholars themselves who will create the ultimate Encyclopaedia Africana.
But my estimates, for instance, based upon book information, were simply ridiculous, fanciful images of African attractions were soon dissipated, anticipated pleasures vanished, and all crude ideas began to resolve themselves into shape.
I believe the more you come to Europe, it makes you a better player, and it gives them an advantage because the African style is different from the European style.
I long for a South African society that’s free of ideological forces – no society can ever really be free of ideological forces – but I wish it was free of power.
So often, literature about African people is conflated with literature about African politics, as if the state were somehow of greater import or interest than the individual.
Barack Obama’s victories in 2008 and 2012 were dismissed by some of his critics as merely symbolic for African Americans. But there is nothing ‘mere’ about symbols.
I started playing piano; I picked up a ukulele, and I loved it and kept playing that. I play a bit of guitar, and some African drums from back in the day.
My mom is a nurse; my dad is a pediatrician. They were born in the 1940s, and they were both inspired to fight against injustice, whether it was the injustices of the Vietnam War or Watergate or children in poverty or oppression of African Americans in Philadelphia where I was growing up.
The only pool of young people lies in Saudi Arabia, some of the Middle-East countries, and few African countries. But they are not prepared as Indians are… we travel well; we are accepted globally very well, and that makes India truly a place to source world’s workforce.
My mother was a member of the Cape Coloured community. ‘Coloured’ is the South African word for the half-caste community that was a by-product of the early contact between black and white.
South Africans are caring, compassionate and loving people.
For African societies, no issue looms larger than employment. Only vibrant entrepreneurship and thriving small businesses can hope to provide the millions of jobs that are needed.
Obama’s a great speaker. Because of his speaking ability and his appearance, a lot of guys got on board. Being the first African American, a lot guys got on board.
President Obama became our first African American president, and for me, it is the stuff of which dreams are made.
For a while, I was saying ‘no’ way too often. I turned down ‘An Officer and A Gentleman,’ ‘Splash’ and ‘Midnight Express.’ I could name you tons more. I would go off and experience life instead of working – I was learning to fly jets, went on an African safari, sailed the Caribbean – which wasn’t necessarily bad.
This is quite public knowledge. The South African government has said they’re doing it. They’ve started seizing their first couple hundred farms.
I can sample Blink-182 but put an African vocal sample in there.
Let’s face it – think of Africa, and the first images that come to mind are of war, poverty, famine and flies. How many of us really know anything at all about the truly great ancient African civilizations, which in their day, were just as splendid and glorious as any on the face of the earth?
There is no African, myself included, who does not appreciate the help of the wider world, but we do question whether aid is genuine or given in the spirit of affirming one’s cultural superiority.
I don’t know much about pop music, and we sample music from all different cultures. I was trained in West African dance, so my sense of rhythm when I move is obviously informed by that, and I obviously sing in Portuguese.
In ancient African cultures, a young man was not considered a full member of the tribe, an elder, a man. He couldn’t marry and he couldn’t own land until he had killed a lion. It was symbolic.
I didn’t really want to be a teacher, but there was nothing else I could be. Most of those who went to the university became teachers. It was just the racial restriction on Africans.
When I was very little, I was into Michael Jackson. At six or seven, it was Madonna, but she’s not what she used to be. I’ve been into everything from Edith Piaf to Joe Strummer to the Velvet Underground to Suicide to A Tribe Called Quest to African music.
To suggest that God specifically created a worm to torture small African children is blasphemy as far as I can see. The Archbishop of Canterbury doesn’t believe that.
I said, ‘Who said African American founders can’t build a billion dollar company?’
I’m an African American.
Typically, during recessionary times, particular groups suffer higher rates of unemployment -African Americans, and Latinos, and in some cases other minority groups. If you don’t have a high level of training or education you’re going to fall into that category.
When no other schools in the Southeastern Conference or the former Southwestern Conference would award them athletic scholarships, African Americans had been recruited by and playing for Texas Western since the 1950s.
You have to admit that Trump is endlessly creative. He has insulted the disabled, the dead, the parents of the dead, women, Mexicans, Muslims, Asians, African Americans, former POWs, the media and, to get just a bit more specific, ‘The Post.’
When we say Afro American, we include everyone in the Western Hemisphere of African descent. South America is America. Central America is America. South America has many people in it of African descent.
Making African American films are hard in Hollywood. We need to rely on a support network and bring more cohesion to different filmmakers, actors, producers etc. It’s a very difficult business. There aren’t a lot of Africans Americans or people of color in high positions in Hollywood that we can green-light films.
The north of the Central African Republic is now a war zone, with rival armed bands burning villages, kidnapping children, robbing travelers and killing people with impunity.
We deliberately used elements from Brazilian music and from African and Asian music. Now people can hear that but then it sounded so abstract, they couldn’t hear it.
We still have a lot of work to do as African artists to get more recognition in the U.K. and the U.S., but right now, definitely, we’re getting the recognition. The thing is we have to earn it. Keep working. Stay working.
My African heritage is a part of reggae music roots, and the concept is that the album, ‘Revelation Part 1: The Root of Life’ is a tribute to roots reggae music. The fruit is what blossoms into different colors and shades, but the root has to stand predominant.
I’m African-American. I’d rather follow an African religion. That’s my heritage.
To live your life well, and have respect for what came before or after – there’s a strong respect for that in African culture.
I want you to know that I don’t have any right, Malawi has no right to stop any president from coming to an African Union summit because that is an African Union meeting.
I question the political judgement of those who would have the nerve to paint Christ white with his obvious African nose, lips and wooly hair.
The entering class I joined in 1956 included just nine women, up from five in the then second-year class, and only one African American. All professors, in those now-ancient days, were of the same race and sex.
We African Americans have now spent the major part of the 20th Century battling racism.
Philosophically, Dubois may have had no problem with a great African American institution. On the other hand, he always believed ultimately in the co-mingling of groups and the interplay of talents and in the collaboration of groups.
The fact that I have always been deeply invested in politics, and African politics in particular, inevitably played a role in my first novel and, of course, in my decision to write about a handful of particular conflicts in Africa as a journalist.
It’s so fantastic that Prince William has championed African wildlife. He’s putting his back into it – and one thing the royal family is brilliant at is getting people to cough up.
I knew I didn’t want to come out in the ‘New Yorker’; it just felt wrong. It needed an African conversation.
First we have to recognize that the cause of poverty is both structural and behavioral. And the first thing about the behavior part is that we need a moral revolution within the African American community. Look – no white racist makes you get pregnant when you are a black teenager.
