Africa is not fulfilling people’s hopes and aspirations. African leaders have not had an agenda that included governing Africa so that people would find their careers, their life, dreams and visions fulfilled here.
I want to go back to the Pantanal in Brazil. I’ve never been to sub-Saharan Africa. I’d like to take my Caravan over there and do a flying safari. I’ve never flown to Alaska.
This is my first opportunity to visit this part of North Africa, so I am going to be able to go back home and talk about this beautiful country and encourage Americans to travel here.
Africa is on the rise.
Compared to developed countries, or even to some major emerging countries, burdened by aging populations, financial crises, widening budget deficits, faltering faith in politics and growing social demands, Africa has become the world’s last ‘New Frontier:’ a kind of ‘it-continent.’
Africa is a very dangerous place.
I love Russia. Some people love Africa, some people love Mexico, some people love purple, the color purple. I love Russia, and I’m not scared to say it.
I usually make sure that my stories are from Africa or my own background so as to highlight the cultural background at the same time as telling the story.
In February 2004, the two traditional torturers of Haiti – France and the United States – combined to back a military coup and send President Aristide off to Africa. The U.S. denies him permission to return to the entire region.
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.
There is no more apartheid in South Africa than in the United States.
It turns out that, if you want to know what the U.S. military is doing in Africa, it’s advantageous to be connected to a large engineering or construction firm looking for business.
The memoirs that have come out of Africa are sometimes startlingly beautiful, often urgent, and essentially life-affirming, but they are all performances of courage and honesty.
I thought ‘Out of Africa’ would be a beautiful ballet.
I’m not a prophet; I can only use historical reality to come to a view of the future, and my view is that Africa will return to being African and not European. The advent of colonialism was foreign to the country itself, but it will return to what it was before the Europeans arrived.
I think South Africa has shown it can host such a big event as the World Cup, so why not hold the Olympics at some point in Africa? Maybe not just in one country but in a host of countries.
Yeah, my dad was in the foreign service. We lived in India, Indonesia and Africa, and we traveled a lot from those places. I was 10 when we moved back, and I felt like the odd guy out. It wasn’t until later that I appreciated it. But coming back I didn’t know any TV shows or music, which was even worse.
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.
Increasing extremism – across Africa and the world – must be understood in the context of the failure of our leaders properly to manage diversity within their borders.
When I was in the Peace Corps I never made a phone call. I was in Central Africa; I didn’t make a phone call for two years. I was in Uganda for another four years and I didn’t make a phone call. So for six years I didn’t make a phone call, but I wrote letters, I wrote short stories, I wrote books.
The uniqueness of the United States in human history is the United States is the first global power in human history which emerged far away from Africa or Asia, which is the main land of human history.
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.
The tour of South Africa is a tough one and if you start thinking like this before it then it is not helpful for anyone.
What I quickly discovered is that our so-called new South Africa has as much material for a story-teller as the old one. The landscape hasn’t really changed. Who is in power now is different to who was in power then, but the squatter camps grow like cancer, the rich get richer, the poor get poorer.
When you look at – when you talk to people in Africa and across the Middle East, they’re not satisfied with the way things are going. Sure, this idea of democracy was injected into the region, but it has brought mostly chaos.
Rwanda, which is one of the younger independent states in Africa, must be regarded as a model of how great human trauma can be transformed to commence true reconstruction of people. Human trauma can lead to stunted growth and mass withdrawal.
Well, I think by any expectation South Africa has come a tremendously long way. We’ve seen a society that many people thought couldn’t withstand a peaceful transition to democracy without a great deal of violence, in fact, make that transition and do it in relative peace and security.
The strange thing about Africa is how past, present and future come together in a kind of rough jazz, if you like.
Africa is the most weathered continent in the world; 75 percent of its soil has been degraded. You don’t just bring that back. I always like to say it’s like putting an oxygen mask on a cadaver; it just isn’t going to work.
I read all of Rider Haggard’s books. For me he had the romance of Africa with a little bit of mysticism. I’m delighted to be looked on as his heir and be categorised as an adventure novelist because that’s exactly what I am.
Africa has lost its dream, and when people don’t have a dream and don’t pursue it, they flounder. People are shocked that I would move to Africa. But I say the place of greatest need is the place of greatest opportunity.
By the end of 2020, the only region of the world that will still have a lot of 2G connections may be Africa.
But since independence, Gabon is one of the few countries in Central Africa that enjoys peace and stability.
South Africa is highly politicised; even small issues become politicised, and it becomes quite bitter.
The two lines from ‘Roots’ that stick out to me are, ‘You no more in Africa. You in America now,’ and what I said after Kunta escaped: ‘What is it like to be free, Kunta? It must be something.’
In my view, the humanity of our world can be measured against the fate of Africa.
Coming home, we stopped for a bite to eat and ran into a confused waitress. Had a heart-rending time trying to speak the Words of Life to her, and as I think of all this country now, many just as confused, and more so, I realized that the 39th Street bus is as much a mission field as Africa ever was.
Nelson Mandela sat in a South African prison for 27 years. He was nonviolent. He negotiated his way out of jail. His honor and suffering of 27 years in a South African prison is really ultimately what brought about the freedom of South Africa. That is nonviolence.
My heart is in South Africa, through my mum. My mum being from here, me spending a lot of time here as well, I feel most connected to this part of the world.
When something happens in Africa, an artist will sing about it and stuff. We have all the records; we have everything. Free Mandela records and all that.
Drug manufacturers could afford to sell AIDS drugs in Africa at virtually any discount. The companies said they did not do so because Africa lacked the requisite infrastructure.
So the experts think we could have an AIDS-free generation in Africa by 2015, even if the mothers are positive.
There is a greater fatigue concerning the African problem today than five or 10 years ago. The situation now in Africa is worse today than it was 10 years ago.
To be frank, I don’t think President Obama gives much thought to Africa – or gives much to Africa.
The most important thing for Africa is that whoever wants to invest in our countries should start in manufacturing.
Historically, epics are set in Africa or Asia or the Wild West, but if you make an epic today it’s hard to disassociate from the contemporary realities of those places.
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.
On Saturday, I was a surgeon in South Africa, very little known. On Monday, I was world renowned.
Saudi Arabia has supported Wahhabi madrasas in poor countries in Africa and Asia, exporting extremism and intolerance. Saudi Arabia also exports instability with its brutal war in Yemen, intended to check what it sees as Iranian influence.
I spent a lot of my childhood saying goodbye because I went to boarding school. I didn’t resent my parents for sending me there so young as I understood the limitations of the education system in Africa, where we lived at the time.
Personally, I believe in self-determination, but in the context of one South Africa – so that my self-determination is based in this region, and with my people.
I realized that I was African when I came to the United States. Whenever Africa came up in my college classes, everyone turned to me. It didn’t matter whether the subject was Namibia or Egypt; I was expected to know, to explain.
