Quotes about Africa

The giraffe, in their queer, inimitable, vegetative gracefulness, as if it were not a herd of animals but a family of rare, long-stemmed, speckled gigantic flowers slowly advancing.

I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong hills...

Before I was born, I lived in my mother's belly and I was very secure and happy there.  I had everything I could possibly want.  Then one day I was pushed through a doorway into a strange world of noise and confusion.  I was angry at first, but soon learned to love being a child.  But no sooner was I enjoying myself and perfectly happy to stay a child forever, than I was pushed through another doorway into a strange world where I had responsibilities, and wives, and work.  But I loved my family, and I would have been happy to stay that way forever, but the years passed, and I was shoved through another door and became and elder, and now I have arrived at the end of that life also.  You ask me if I am afraid of what happens next and I tell you:  'I have learned to understand that what is before me is just another doorway, and I am ready.'

"Nadie conoce lo que ha trabajado el negro°

I grew up in a world that regarded authenticity as something deep within one's soul-- governed by one's conscience and measured against one's true nature. A question of being true to oneself. Of avoiding artifice. Kuranko do not fetishize the ego as we do, but emphasize a person's social nous. As such, authenticity is consummated in the way one realizes one's given destiny or plays one's social role. The name of the game is not self-knowledge, but knowing one's place and making the most of it. Fot this reason implies theatricality implies something very different from acting out. rather than spontaneously giving vent to one's feelings, one learns to perform the gestures and emotions appropriate to one's role.

This extravagant dwelling, as domineering as it was distant, brought home to me the intimateconnection between tyranny and abstraction, and put me in mind of John Berger's observation that "abstraction's capacity to ignore what is real is undoubtedly where most evil begins."

If S.B. sometimes railed against Western customs, treating democracy as if it was a euphemism for bad faith, red tape, and diplomatic evasiveness, this was not because he put himself above the lway, ready to waive constitutional procedures, or ignore the views of others. It simply reflected his impatience with indecisiveness, and his aristocratic heritage. It was his pride in this heritage that led him, as an eleven year old boy to stand up to Mr. Vincent's disparaging conflation of Kuranko and savages. To be Kuranko was, as his father had told him, the only conceivable way of being a man. But when S. B. invoked Kuranko-ness, it was not some form of tribalism that he had in mind, but the values he held dear-- not only forthrightness, stoicism, hard work, and self-reliance, but also honesty, generosit, and fidelity to one's principles. Pertinently, it was S. B. many years ago, who provided me with a not implausible etymology for the word Kuranko. "It iwas from the kure tree," he said, "whose wood is very hard."Thus, to say kure n'ko is to imply that the speaker is tough-minded, able to withstand all kinds of hardships, and persevere, like the kure tree.

"In Africa," S. B. once remarked, "if you do well, people close to you will hate you."