Look at the history of peace accords in Africa. They have a terrible record. They are shredded even before the ink on them is dry.
As regards to personal safety, you do have to be careful not to put yourself at risk when travelling in South Africa. You don’t want to go out exploring at night, for example.
Compared to people in Africa, I think we’ve all had privileged upbringings.
If I were to live in Africa, serving the poor, the number-one thing I’d miss wouldn’t be running water or electricity – it would be style… being able to get dressed up and feel beautiful.
In my many trips to South Africa, I have met and spoken to a lot of people there, and they all seem to find apartheid as repellent as you would.
As a young boy, I had strange dreams of affecting people and somehow being instrumental in changing the makeup of Africa and helping to improve life there.
Africa has 53 countries. And you find that three or four countries in these 53 are dominating the news.
Of course, Nelson Mandela, everybody knows Nelson Mandela. I mean, he’s a great gift not only for Africa but for the whole world, actually. But do not expect everybody to be a Nelson Mandela.
There was no United States before slavery. I am sure somebody can make some sort of argument about modern French identity and slavery and North Africa, but there simply is no American history before black people.
It is wrong to divide the nation white against black, native born against immigrant or one religion against another. It is also wrong to divide people by income. East Germany was not an improvement over South Africa. Obama divides Americans against each other. This is wrong.
Swaziland is a small part of south-east Africa, the last country in the continent to gain its independence.
I live in South Africa. I’m proud to live there. I’ve always said I want to be a comedian from South Africa in the world. I will stay in places for a bit here and there and pop into New York for a while, maybe stay in London for a year, but my home will always be South Africa. I enjoy it too much.
We grow up in New Zealand from a young age getting up at 3am to watch the All Blacks play South Africa or England, it’s part of who we are. So to be an All Black now is amazing.
Nelson Mandela will always be the face of South Africa. The traveler passing through the country will see Mandela’s face almost everywhere he looks. Truly, the man is omnipresent.
From the beginning, Mandela and Tambo was besieged with clients. We were not the only African lawyers in South Africa, but we were the only firm of African lawyers. For Africans, we were the firm of first choice and last resort.
Multinationals don’t pay taxes in Africa – we all know that.
Could I say that the reason that I am here today, you know, from the mouth of the State Department itself, is: I should not be allowed to travel because I have struggled for years for the independence of the colonial peoples of Africa.
Reading the text of my blog itself is not really the interesting part. The exciting part is how the Internet allows me to be the eyes and ears for the people sending me postings from Africa.
When I went to live in South Africa, I immediately began to understand what went wrong. Because here was a place supposed to be under apartheid – I arrived there in 1991 – but here a black person had more say and had more influence over his white government than an average Kenyan had over the Moi government.
The richest persons in Africa are heads of state, governors and ministers. So every ‘educated’ African who wants to be rich – and there is nothing wrong with wanting to be rich – heads straight into government or politics.
I will not leave South Africa, nor will I surrender. Only through hardship, sacrifice and militant action can freedom be won. The struggle is my life. I will continue fighting for freedom until the end of my days.
The biggest lesson from Africa was that life’s joys come mostly from relationships and friendships, not from material things. I saw time and again how much fun Africans had with their families and friends and on the sports fields; they laughed all the time.
My father was champion of North Africa and he beat the European champ. He was very good, a professional for 12 years. We’re from a big family of boxers. My father has seven brothers.
It’s not just Ethiopia, but Africa in general – most of the media concentrates on what’s not going well. But there is so much beauty there. When you go, it changes everything. It changes you, your life, and the way you see things. The challenge is changing the image of Africa that’s been anchored in people for years now.
Ultimately the white man should leave the United States and the black people should go back to Africa.
I think the Cold War was worse for Africa than colonialism.
South Africa is blessed to have women and men like yourselves who have little to give but give what you have with open hands and open hearts.
As a young man in South Africa at the beginning of the twentieth century, Gandhi developed satyagraha, a mode of political activism based upon moral persuasion, while mobilizing South Africa’s small Indian minority against racial discrimination.
I was being groomed as an undergraduate to specialize in Midwestern prehistory, but going back to my teenage days, my interest has always been in our early human ancestors. I wanted to work in Africa.
Slavery in West Africa, and in Rome and in the Mediterranean, was something different than slavery in America.
Do you think that the people of South Africa, or anywhere on the continent of Africa, or India, or Pakistan are longing to be kicked around all over again?
White sharks and tuna travel for thousands of miles before returning to the same hot spot just as salmon do when they return to the same stream. These journeys are the marine equivalent of wildebeest migrations that take place on the Serengeti plain in Africa.
In fact, a large majority of those have died and of those expected to die of AIDS, as well as of those who are infected with the virus, are in sub-Saharan Africa.
Roads are not practical in Africa.
I don’t think Africa gets as much credit as it should have on the world stage. People tend to think of us as coming from The Dark Continent, where nothing good goes on. That’s not true. A huge amount of, as I say, entrepreneurship goes on.
Everything that the West is today is predominantly because of Africa.
In Russia, they have Rusalkis, and they have Selkies in Scotland, and in Fiji, you have a special mention of it. The first earliest mermaid mentioned in history books was Atargartis in Assyria, a thousand B.C… In Africa, you have Mami Wata.
I am happy to playing against teams like South Africa and Australia early on in my career. It is going to make me stronger as a cricketer.
Happily, there’s a reversal of the brain drain occurring in Ghana now. We’re seeing a lot of – actually in Africa – we’re seeing a lot of African professionals, you know, returning to the continent to contribute their quota.
There’s a saying in Africa: ‘To find out you are pregnant is to have one foot in the grave.’
Sometime during the many millions of years that have elapsed since mammalian faunas came into existence, some sort of island crossed from West Africa to South America.
To have been selected to represent Team South Africa at the London 2012 Olympic Games in the individual 400m and the 4x400m relay is a real honor and I am so pleased that years of hard work, determination and sacrifice have all come together.
Americans’ perceptions of Africa remain rooted in troubling stereotypes of helplessness and perpetual crisis.
I go back to South Africa at least once a year, sometimes twice, and usually for a month. And probably, I’m guessing, I’ll spend more time back there as I get older.
I would hazard a guess that we have found fossilized human remains of at least a thousand different specimens in South and East Africa, more or less complete at that. I think this is where the prelude to human history was primarily played out.
The future belongs to us, because we have taken charge of it. We have the commitment, we have the resourcefulness, and we have the strength of our people to share the dream across Africa of clean water for all.
We say that the ICC is targeting Africans, but all of the victims in our cases in Africa are African victims.
Mugabe’s become a disgrace to Africa. And I must say this because I am an African and a lot of us looked up to him back in the 1980s when he was the liberation hero. But he’s now turned himself into a murderous despot.
In the following pages I have endeavoured to describe all that appeared to me most important and interesting among the events and the scenes that came under my notice during my sojourn in the interior of Africa.
Mobile phones could not work in Africa without prepaid because it’s a cash society.
I got to Africa. I got the opportunity to go and learn, not about any animal, but chimpanzees. I was living in my dream world, the forest in Gombe National Park in Tanzania. It was Tanganyika when I began.
There are few people who define the word, ‘rock star’ better than U2’s Bono. He’s revered the world over not just for leading one of the biggest bands ever, but for his very public work on behalf of the underprivileged in Africa.
