Wole Soyinka
“Well, some people say I’m pessimistic because I recognize the eternal cycle of evil. All I say is, look at the history of mankind right up to this moment and what do you find?
“Things do not always happen as one plans. There are many disappointments in life. There is always the unexpected. You plan carefully, you decide on one step after another, and then…well, that is life. We are not God. So you see, one cannot afford to be weighed down by the unexpected. You will find that only determination will bring one through, sheer determination. And faith in God. Don’t ever neglect your prayers….”
Buchi Emecheta
“Being a woman writer, I would be deceiving myself if I said I write completely through the eye of a man. There’s nothing bad in it, but that does not make me a feminist writer. I hate that name. The tag is from the Western world – like we are called the Third World.”
“As soon as I finish a book, I sell the paperback rights to different publishers and that’s where I recoup my money”.
“Black women all over the world should re-unite and re-examine the way history has portrayed us”.
Aime Cesaire
“It is not a dead society that we want to revive. We leave that to those who go in for exoticism. Nor is it the present colonial society that we wish to prolong, the most putrid carrion that ever rotted under the sun. It is a new society that we must create.”
Culture is everything. Culture is the way we dress, the way we carry our heads, the way we walk, the way we tie our ties – it is not only the fact of writing books or building houses.”
Delphine Zanga Tsogo
Tsogo best known novels: Women’s Lives (1983) and The Caged Bird (1984). While both novels are non-fiction, they follow struggles encountered by many women, and are relatable for young adults and older readers. Tsogo is known for her ability to write characters that anyone can relate to, even if their life experiences are vastly different. Both of her books follow the stories of young women who are disappointed by their lots in life, and work to change their paths for the better proactively.
Cheikh Anta Diop
He told the First International Congress of Black Writers and Artists in September 1956, “we have come to discover that the ancient Pharaonic Egyptian civilisation was undoubtedly a Negro civilisation. To defend this thesis, anthropological, ethnological, linguistic, historical, and cultural arguments have been provided. To judge their validity, it suffices to refer to Nations nègres et culture …”
“The ancestors of the Blacks, who today live mainly in Black Africa, were the first to invent mathematics, astronomy, the calendar, sciences in general, arts, religion, agriculture, social organisation, medicine, writing, architecture.”
“It can be said that, until the fifteenth century, Black Africa never lost its civilisation”
“Humanity’s moral conscience progresses, slowly yet surely…”
Miriam Tlali
“You know, in Sophiatown we had very few educated Africans, but they were so broad in their reading. They all had books in their pockets. My husband was one of them. I don’t think I would have stayed very long with him if he were different.”
“Just by itself, a good book, if it has the right messages in it, can change a whole human being. It can remake a person.”
“My mother used to carry a copy of the manuscript around, wrapped in a cloth. There were quite a number [of publishers] whom I tried and they all turned it down. Finally, the system gradually changed, and in 1974 somebody told me about Raven Press.”
James Baldwin
“The victim who is able to articulate the situation of the victim, has ceased to be a victim: he or she has become a threat.”
“Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity.”
“It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here.”
“To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.”
Margaret Ogola
“True justice should be for each human being, visible and invisible, young and old, disabled and able, to enjoy fully their right to life. The accidental attributes that we acquire such as colour, gender intelligence, economic circumstances, physical or mental disability, should not be used as an excuse to deprive a person of life.”
“How can you know where you are going if you do not know where you are coming from?”
“the living must tear themselves from the dead and continue with the business of life”
“A home without daughters is like a spring without a source”
Chinua Achebe
“A man who calls his kinsmen to a feast does not do so to save them from starving. They all have food in their own homes. When we gather together in the moonlit village ground it is not because of the moon. Every man can see it in his own compound. We come together because it is good for kinsmen to do so.”
“There is no story that is not true, […] The world has no end, and what is good among one people is an abomination with others.”
I believe in the complexity of the human story, and that there’s no way you can tell that story in one way and say, ‘this is it.’ Always there will be someone who can tell it differently depending on where they are standing … this is the way I think the world’s stories should be told: from many different perspectives.
Zulu Sofola
“I am motivated by human problems that confront us all. It depends on the spirit of a problem before I get the kind of inspiration which makes me want to write about it. …”
“Most of my writing questions the ‘isms’ that have been superimposed on the African people. …”
“Education is one of the most important means to give women the knowledge, skills, and self-confidence necessary for emancipation.”
Alexander Pushkin
“I loved you: and, it may be, from my soul
The former love has never gone away,
But let it not recall to you my dole;
I wish not sadden you in any way.
I loved you silently, without hope, fully,
In diffidence, in jealousy, in pain;
I loved you so tenderly and truly,
As let you else be loved by any man. ”
“I’ve lived to bury my desires
and see my dreams corrode with rust
now all that’s left are fruitless fires
that burn my empty heart to dust.
Struck by the clouds of cruel fate
My crown of Summer bloom is sere
Alone and sad, I watch and wait
And wonder if the end is near.”
“It’s a lucky man, a very lucky man, who is committed to what he believes, who has stifled intellectual detachment and can relax in the luxury of his emotions – like a tipsy traveller resting for the night at a wayside inn.”
Molara Ogundipe
“We must remember that there were radical outlets for women in indigenous African cultures, and in our colonised societies, contact with Europe brought with it the inheritance of European movements and social concerns.”
“African women’s knowledge production is not much discussed or well known in the dominant and contemporary traditions of African knowledge. Whenever we say “women”, the first thought that comes to most minds is children or cooking or satisfying men’s sexual desires and other needs. Only a few scholars have explored the knowledge production of women.”
“What we want in Africa is social transformation. It is not about warring with men, the reversal of role, or doing to men whatever women think that men have been doing for centuries, but it is trying to build a harmonious society.” ACAP Team.