African Literature Quotes

“Most people write me off when they see me.
They do not know my story.
They say I am just an African.
They judge me before they get to know me.
What they do not know is
The pride I have in the blood that runs through my veins;
The pride I have in my rich culture and the history of my people;
The pride I have in my strong family ties and the deep connection to my community;
The pride I have in the African music, African art, and African dance;
The pride I have in my name and the meaning behind it.
Just as my name has meaning, I too will live my life with meaning.
So you think I am nothing?
Don’t worry about what I am now,
For what I will be, I am gradually becoming.
I will raise my head high wherever I go
Because of my African pride,
And nobody will take that away from me.”
― idowu koyenikan, Wealth for all Africans: How Every African Can Live the Life of Their Dreams

“You can no longer see or identify yourself solely as a member of a tribe, but as a citizen of a nation of one people working toward a common purpose.”
― idowu koyenikan, Wealth for all Africans: How Every African Can Live the Life of Their Dreams

“The God of Imagination lived in fairytales. And the best fairytales made you fall in love. It was while flicking through "Sleeping Beauty" that I met my first love, Ivar. He was a six-year-old bello ragazzo with blond hair and eyebrows. He had bomb-blue eyes and his two front teeth were missing.
The road to Happily Ever After, however, was paved with political barbed wire. Three things stood in my way.
1. The object of my affection didn't know he was the object of my affection.
2. The object of my affection preferred Action Man to Princess Aurora.
3. The object of my affection was a boy and I wasn't allowed to love a boy.”
― Diriye Osman, Fairytales for Lost Children

“Whatever you are looking for is also looking for you. You see, don't only look. Be available and ready when it shows up”
― Sahndra Fon Dufe

“A PHD is not the end of education. Education exists even among the bees who feed their queen only with the purest”
― Sahndra Fon Dufe

“I'm not interested in whether I'm better than you; only whether I'm better than yesterday.”
― Mike Ormsby, Child Witch Kinshasa

“...there is indeed a great force in the world, a force spiritual and able to shape the physical universe, but that force is not something cut off, not something separate from ourselves. It is the energy in us, the strongest in our working, breathing, thinking together as one people; weakest when we are scattered, confused, broken into individual, unconnected fragments.”
― Ayi Kwei Armah

“She spoke of those needing the white destroyers' shiny things to bring a feeling of worth into their lives, uttered their deep-rooted inferiority of soul, and called them lacking in the essence of humanity: womanhood in women, manhood in men. For which deficiency they must crave things to eke out their beings, things to fill holes in their spirits.”
― Ayi Kwei Armah, Two Thousand Seasons

“once you make yourself a freak and special any bastard starts to use you. That's half of the fierce fight in Africa'

— Elizabeth”
― Bessie Head, A Question of Power

“A dance with the clouds. After this dance what next. When charcoal becomes ambers and fire remind us about sweet melodies. When human emotions stop to sing and we marry our sins. A dance in between fences and living inside furnaces. A million stars had dropped, a million moons spurred hope under our broken shadows. I remain here, I remain dancing with the clouds.”
― Tapiwanaishe Pamacheche, Depth of colour

“It is in your heart. There is a tree growing in your heart, of wealth, right there. There is already a world in there. Its branches will someday heal another heart.”
― Tsholofelo Lehaha, In the midst of the womb

“The Sun has risen,
It will fill us warmth & love-
Love for one another,
Love Between tribes-”
― Ebrahim N. Hussein, Kinjeketile

“Man, this one,' he thought, 'this one is very much fit for human consumption!'- David G. Maillu”
― David G Maillu, Unfit for human consumption

“While at the hospital, he felt so awful about his fallen life. It was so surprising how someone could change from grace to disgrace. He realized that just as a man was capable of growing physically and spiritually strong, he was capable of growing weak.”
― David G Maillu, Unfit for human consumption

“Grace had always found the old priest's inflexibility towards the spirit world baffling. He accepted angels and the Holy Spirit but rejected outright ancestors and any other spirits as pagan superstitions. This seemed illogical to her; either you believed in spirits or you didn't.”
― Iris Mwanza, The Lions' Den

“Grace understood that her job as a lawyer was to bear witness to these atrocities of the past, and to keep telling the truth, the whole truth, so help her God and her ancestors.”
― Iris Mwanza, The Lions' Den

“When she was nine, she had cut an onion for the first time. She had cried so much that she couldn’t continue cooking the meal and her sister, Amina, had teased her that no one would want to marry her if she couldn’t cook. Over the years she had invented different styles to try and cope with the burning. She would try closing her eyes, but almost always ended up cutting a finger. Then she learned to cut onions under running water, but they became too wet to cook with. So she went through the painful experience everyday. After a few years her eyes stopped burning, her nose stopped dripping and the dull ache in her head subsided. Her eyes absorbed the onions’ properties, blended them into her corneas and fused them to her pupils.
Maybe this is why her eyes held a watery gaze.”
― Shubnum Khan, Onion Tears

“Poetry found me playing in the streets, it said, bleed, bleed everywhere, and do not stop writing.”
― Tsholofelo Lehaha, In the midst of the womb

“To the women that carried my spiritual bones when my own wrists were too loose, my mama. I use the word women because she is a lot of women in one.”
― Tsholofelo Lehaha, In the midst of the womb

“Sometimes our feelings fly home. Sometimes we make home cooked meals and feed our souls. We align ourselves with our feelings.”
― Tsholofelo Lehaha, In the midst of the womb

“By seventeen forty-six it was already darkening… Slowly the flicker dimmed till it was dark, with enough space for my thoughts to fill up the room.”
― Tsholofelo Lehaha

“Sometimes we are given people in our lives for a little while to get the breed of greatness found in them so they will manifest in us even when they are out of sight.”
― Tsholofelo Lehaha, In the midst of the womb

“I told myself that one day these branches in my heart will turn into a glade of two tamed hearts, that one day life will serve me revolutionary enough to make this world ours.”
― Tsholofelo Lehaha, In the midst of the womb

“My honey bronze legs were sprawled on top of his chino laps, my aura was orange. What were the odds?”
― Tsholofelo Lehaha, In the midst of the womb

“That struggle between the fallible ambition of man to lean towards immortality and the fleshly evidence of his certain mortality; that tormenting battle with his consciousness, which is able to live vicariously at any point in time, which dreams, loves, hopes, and aspires to the immortal, but is always brought down to earth by his flesh, this container in which he has been contained, and which will inevitably return to the earth to rot. Too much dreaming, and he begins to forget his fallibility and, believing himself to be infallible, he commits horrendous acts of ambition which amount to crimes against humanity; too much dying, and he begins to forget the sacredness of life, the beauty of dreaming, to live in fear and be paralyzed by fear.”
― Novuyo Rosa Tshuma, House of Stone

“She studied her body under the silvery glaze of the moon, from her dust-peppered feet on the clay earth to her flabby waist. It must be laughable that a large woman like her could feel small, but so were palm nuts hidden beneath layers of fleshy, fibrous fruit.”
― Oyindamola Dosunmu, Your Tomorrow Was Today

“I became my grief. I wept in advance for all the things that would happen, the unimaginable things beyond the horizon of all the narratives of our lives. Misery filled me like water fills a deep well after a heavy downpour. I started to choke. My spirit companions drank of my grief and filled me with sweet songs to make my wretchedness more sublime. My heart stopped beating. I froze, became rigid, didn't breathe, my mouth open, eyes wide. Darkness rushed over me, a powerful wind from the forest. The darkness extinguished my consciousness.

But deep inside that darkness a counterwave, a rebellion of joy, stirred. It was a peaceful wave, breaking on the shores of my spirit. I heard soft voices singing and a very brilliant light came closer and closer to the centre of my forehead. And then suddenly, out of the centre of my forehead, an eye opened, and I saw this light to be the brightest, most beautiful thing in the world. It was terribly hot, but it did not burn. It was fearfully radiant, but it did not blind. As the light came closer, I became more afraid. Then my fear turned. The light went into the new eye and into my brain and roved around my spirit and moved in my veins and circulated in my blood and lodged itself in my heart. And my heart burned with a searing agony, as if it were being burnt to ashes within me. As I began to scream the pain reached its climax and a cool feeling of divine dew spread through me, making the reverse journey of the brilliant light, cooling its flaming passages, till it got back to the centre of my forehead, where it lingered, the feeling of a kiss forever imprinted, a mystery and a riddle that not even the dead can answer.”
― Ben Okri, The Famished Road

“Appartenir à une terre, ce n'est pas seulement y être né, c'est accepter de porter son héritage comme une boussole, même quand les vents de l'histoire cherchent à nous désorienter.”
― Mbida Mbida Camille, Sous les Étoiles du Cameroun - Chronique d'un pays aux mille visages

“it is already too late , our own men and our sons have joined the ranks of the stranger. they have joined his religion and they help to uphold his government. if we should try to drive out the white men in Umuofia we should find it easy. There is only two of them. but what of our own people who are following their way and have been given power? they would go to Umuru and bring the soldiers , and we would be like Abame”
― Chinua Achebe, Africa

“To all the black children in this world, indeed being black is not offensive. We are black not malicious. And it did not happen by accident. Neither do you have to think of yourself as an embarrassment because our skin colour speaks from a different tone.”
― Dumisani Tafadzwa Mayele