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.’
