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.
