Top 470 African Quotes

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.
Monique Coleman
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.
Mr. T
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.
St. Lucia
I realized that you cannot think European and want to write or create something African. You have to think African in everything.
Fela Kuti
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.
Burna Boy
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.
Marcus Samuelsson
It takes time for brown people and people of different ethnicities to get into the Hollywood world, which is predominantly Caucasian and African American.
Utkarsh Ambudkar
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.
Mo Ibrahim
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.
Ric Keller
As a South African, the idea of turkey was new to me. And confusing. It’s about the least flavorful bird on the planet.
Kimbal Musk
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.
Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala
I say that I represent this movement because my intellectual allegiances are clearly European, not African.
J. M. Coetzee
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.
Brian Eno
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.
Bozoma Saint John
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.
Robert Griffin III
Chermoula is a potent North African spice paste that is ideal for smearing on your favourite vegetables for roasting.
Yotam Ottolenghi
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.
Abigail Spanberger
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.
Cheo Hodari Coker
We must investigate without fear or favour the so-calle

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.
Cyril Ramaphosa
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.
Hugh Masekela
I love African American women, but I just don’t like my skin complexion.
Kodak Black
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?’
Naya Rivera
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.
Nick Turse
To me, Harlem is one of the most important places on the earth, particularly when it comes to talking about African Americans.
Cheo Hodari Coker
My husband is actually biracial. He is Caucasian and African American. And my brother’s fiance is Latina. So we have a colorful family.
Aja Brown
We wish to ensure that young Africans do not feel disorientated in the century in which they live.
Abdoulaye Wade
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.
Pope Benedict XVI
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.
Todrick Hall
People used to call me names, so my mom had this beautiful African lady come talk to me.
Leslie Jones
I believe that there is a God, and coming from an African tradition, I believe also that there are gods.
Ishmael Beah
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.
Misty Copeland
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.
Hiram Rhodes Revels
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.
Henry Louis Gates
I love writing for other actors, women of African descent and people who are generally underrepresented.
Danai Gurira
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.
Pete Seeger
I remember, growing up, it wasn’t sexy to be African. We got called names.
Yvonne Orji
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.
James Forman, Jr.
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.
Jean Pigozzi
In ‘Bayou Magic,’ I write about African goddess-mermaids who accompanied slaves to America.
Jewell Parker Rhodes
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.
Katherine Dunham
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.
Kerry Washington
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.
Ashley Graham
What we, as African Americans, stood on was our faith.
Ruby Bridges
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.
Richard Attias
‘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.
Nnedi Okorafor
I’m always very proud of belonging to three minorities: gay, Jewish, white South African.
Antony Sher
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.
Miriam Makeba
African Americans have always known that a little bit of paranoia was healthy for us.
Cynthia McKinney
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.
St. Lucia
I have been working for Africans since I was 18, when I

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.
Bono
We are different from many African countries. We represent Africa as the gateway and will do everything to make African and Israeli relations mushroom.
Hailemariam Desalegn