Meles Zenawi Quotes

I talk about Africa and its meaning, being the birthplace of man and all that great history that's been erased and even hidden. I think it's my duty to be proud and to bring about the conversation that allows us to talk about the great history of my people.

I am proud to be an African.

We have our own script. We have our own calendar. We represent the greatness of Africa's past. We also represent the worst of Africa's present, in terms of poverty. It is the best and the worst of African reality.

I am an African and I am very proud of that.

You know, we're missing so much as African-Americans and we should be concerned about what's going on in Africa.

So for everybody who allows themselves to be separated from me because I said 'African' instead of 'Nubian' or 'Black' or 'Kemet' or 'original' or 'Israelite,' don't be so foolish. I say 'African' because the continent of Africa is the land from which we all originate. It is the word that we are most familiar with right now.

I am an African. I live there and my children live there, and as far as I understand, they intend to go on living there.

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.

Our success educationally, industrially and politically is based upon the protection of a nation founded by ourselves. And the nation can be nowhere else but in Africa.

People hear 'Africa' and they think about charitable commercials, or safari tours and animals. It's our responsibility to help change that perspective.

Wakanda, in short, is the Africa of black dreams.

My dad was very much a Pan-Africanist and instilled in me and my siblings a want for that knowledge.

There are some people who are happy to be African writers. They are pan-Africanists. I'm not a pan-Africanist. I think African countries have a lot in common. But we are also very different.

Among Negroes of my generation there was not only little direct acquaintance or consciously inherited knowledge of Africa, but much distaste and recoil because of what the white world taught them about the Dark Continent. There arose resentment that a group like ours, born and bred in the United States for centuries, should be regarded as Africans at all. They were, as most of them began gradually to assert, Americans. My father's father was particularly bitter about this. He would not accept an invitation to a 'Negro' picnic. He would not segregate himself in any way.

Just going to Africa is amazing; it all comes back to the motherland. It's pretty much where everything started.

I am very proud to be African. I want to defend African people, and I want to show to the world that African players can be as good as the Europeans and South Americans.

Writing about Africa by Africans has been part of my literary apprenticeship, standing alongside works by authors such as Joseph Conrad, Joyce Cary and Graham Greene as influences.

They say if you drink Zambezi water with your mother's milk, you are always a slave of Africa, and I am.

Africa for the Africans... at home and abroad!

Africa is my continent. It is where I opened my eyes.

Afrocentricity seeks to re-locate the African person as an agent in human history in an effort to eliminate the illusion of the fringes.

... the Negro in Africa had reared mighty empires, and astonishingly advanced achievements are linked with his race in the annals of mankind.

I'm trying to have Wakanda represent all of Africa.

Being African didn't mean anything to me until later in my life.

I try to represent Africa and Cameroon as well as I can.