The black man in Africa had mastered the arts and sciences. He knew the course of the stars in the universe before the man up in Europe knew that the earth wasn’t flat.
Africa has no future.
Most countries in Africa have the capacity to be great agricultural producers, but they do only subsistence production. So a family will produce for themselves and nothing more. Why? Because of the systems: The markets are not there to go beyond.
I grew up in South Africa without a television; there was no television, and the year after I left, television arrived in South Africa, so I have never really acquired a taste for watching television.
Going to Africa was being able to take my volunteering and my passion for hospice one step further.
I was with a folk trio back in ’63 and ’64, and we traveled all across North Africa, Israel, and Europe.
Islamic fundamentalism in its activist manifestation is bad news. Religious fundamentalism in general is bad news. We know about religious fundamentalism in South Africa. Calvinist fundamentalism has been an unmitigated force of benightedness in our history.
What should we suppose must naturally be the consequence of our carrying on a slave trade with Africa? With a country, vast in its extent, not utterly barbarous, but civilized in a very small degree? Does any one suppose a slave trade would help their civilization?
I have come to one conclusion: All that I am, all that I aspire to be, all that I was before, is by the grace of God. There are so many women in Africa, and outside Africa, who are more intelligent than I am.
Tolkien was influenced by South Africa when he was writing ‘Lord of the Rings.’ It’s really epic scenery.
I like to go to Africa purely with something to do. I’m not very comfortable getting into an armor-plated Land Rover and going to see things, with my hand gel, you know, it’s not me at all. So I like to hang out and you know, really get to know people and try and do something that resonates with them.
When I visit my brother in South Africa, I order things I’ve only seen in zoos. Little deers and kudu, all the mammals you would never think of eating.
I am chairman of the Africa subcommittee in the House of Representatives.
In Africa, music is for everything, Music was originally used for community. That was what music was for.
Having travelled to some 20 African countries, I find myself, like so many other visitors to Africa before me, intoxicated with the continent. And I am not referring to the animals, as much as I have been enthralled by them during safaris in Kenya, Tanzania and Zimbabwe. Rather, I am referring to the African peoples.
Africa will thrive.
Only in South Africa could you have a change in government without civil war. If there wasn’t the depth of love and caring among our people, this would not have happened.
Africa was the most exotic place I could conceive of – the end of the world – and I knew I would go there one day.
All of the philosophers I studied were white (with a few Eastern exceptions), and, for that matter, they were all male. Africa, the cradle of civilization, seemed to have no footing in the highest form of human thought.
I spent seven months in Africa and came back saying there isn’t anything you can say about black people that you couldn’t say about, say, pink people except that they’re black.
One of the main points everywhere in my life is fairness. Coming from South Africa and being treated unfairly all your life because of your skin colour, that’s been a huge point.
In the developing world, it’s about time that women are on the agenda. For instance, 80 percent of small-subsistence farmers in sub-Saharan Africa are women, and yet all the programs in the past were predominantly focused on men.
If I hadn’t left South Africa, I felt I was at risk of being pigeonholed. I looked around and saw actors who, 10 to 15 years into their careers, were still playing stereotypical Afrikaans characters, stereotyped Indian characters. That was not something that I wanted for myself.
I think that black Africa is extremely terrifying. Black Africa can become a maelstrom of warring tribes without the outside world needing to feel the need to do anything about it.
In Africa through the 1990s, with notable exceptions in Senegal and Uganda, nearly all the ruling powers denied they had a problem with AIDS.
In many ways Africa subsidised America and Europe’s development.
God bless Africa, Guard her people, Guide her leaders, And give her peace.
As much as I’m a black person from America, I’m a black person from Africa, too.
Sub-Saharan Africa is also home to 400 million of the world’s poorest people.
I was born in Africa. I came to California because it’s really where new technologies can be brought to fruition, and I don’t see a viable competitor.
I have family members who live in Africa. Because of the family that lives there, I know what is happening in these countries, and it seems so silly to me that diseases like malaria are so prevalent when they are entirely preventable. Yet children are still dying every 35 seconds.
I can’t understand why the front pages of newspapers can cover bird flu and swine flu and everybody is up in arms about that and we still haven’t really woken up to the fact that so many women in sub-Saharan Africa – 60 percent of people in – infected with HIV are women.
I think people should know more of Africa in terms of its joie de vivre, its feeling for life. In spite of the images that one knows about Africa – the economic poverty, the corruption – there’s a joy to living and a happiness in community, living together, in community life, which may be missing here in America.
In South Africa, we drive on the left-hand side, and most of the cars are standard, so I learned with a full-gear transmission with a clutch and hill starts. I’ve never driven an automatic until I came to Canada.
Africa has been troubled for a long time – well, the world has been troubled ever since I was born.
Africa should not just wait to be exploited or influenced. No. We should be part of the conversation. We should raise ourselves to a level where there are certain terms we dictate in the conversation because we have a lot to offer.
A narrative that branded Africa as little more than an economic, political and social basket case was not likely to provide the investment needed to drive development.
If it were in our national security to deploy to South Africa under apartheid, would we have found it acceptable or customary to segregate African American soldiers from other American soldiers, and say, ‘It’s just a cultural thing’? I don’t think so. I would hope not.
I went cage diving in South Africa with Great Whites, and that was fun. Sweden was cool.
When you go to Africa, and you see children, they’re usually barefoot, dirty and in rags, and they’d love to go to school.
It was fortunate in looking back for South Africa and its entire people that Mandela and I found it possible to work together even though big strains developed between us from time to time.
When the first fossils began to be found in eastern Africa, in the late 1950s, I thought, what a wonderful marriage this was, biology and anthropology. I was around 16 years old when I made this particular choice of academic pursuit.
Half of the hospital beds in sub-Saharan Africa are filled with people suffering from what are generally known as water-related diseases.
A genocide in Africa has not received the same attention that genocide in Europe or genocide in Turkey or genocide in other part of the world. There is still this kind of basic discrimination against the African people and the African problems.
In my country of South Africa, we struggled for years against the evil system of apartheid that divided human beings, children of the same God, by racial classification and then denied many of them fundamental human rights.
Africa’s success stories are delivering the whole range of the public goods and services that citizens have a right to expect and are forging a path that we hope more will follow.
The question of modernization is central to disturbances in the Middle East and in Africa. Everyone is after modernization, no matter where they come from. But you have to be careful about it, and more importantly, you have to have sense about it.
Africa, and Zambia in particular, drifted away from the West for a long time, and we have to reconcile.
Wherever I’ve been, and I’ve been to over 20, maybe 25, countries in Africa, I’ve noticed how their backbone is broken. They don’t have any confidence in themselves. They always think a white man will solve their problems from outside for them.
I’ve never been invited to do an exhibition or do a talk in England, except once, about 10 years ago. I’ve given talks all across Canada, many in the United States, South Africa, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan – but not England.
Personally, I regard myself as an intellectual ‘rebel,’ kicking against the ‘old colonialism-imperialism paradigm’ which has landed Africa in a conundrum.
Mahatma Gandhi went from Africa to India, and once India won its freedom, it helped African countries to get their independence.
There is a movement in club football, which I don’t necessarily consider a prime example of solidarity, because it leads us to conclude the rich are getting richer and they are using everything in the market to create an exodus from Africa.
