Hugh Masekela Quotes

Without white South Africa realizing what it had done - and on the basis of that realization having the courage to ask for forgiveness - there can really be no significant movement.

Racial discrimination, South Africa's economic power, its oppression and exploitation of all the black peoples, are part and parcel of the same thing.

As part of the realization of the aim to eradicate racism in our country, we must strive to create and strengthen a black capitalist class… because we come from among the black oppressed, many among us feel embarrassed to state this goal as nakedly as we should.

I think we've become blind in this country to the ways in which we've managed to reinvent a caste-like system here in the United States, one that functions in a manner that is as oppressive, in many respects, as the one that existed in South Africa under apartheid and that existed under Jim Crow here in the United States.

Be nice to the whites, they need you to rediscover their humanity.

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.

You learn pretty fast that there is no magic solution to poverty.

Those who invest in South Africa should not think they are doing us a favor; they are here for what they get out of our cheap and abundant labor, and they should know that they are buttressing one of the most vicious systems.

South Africa is labouring to find its revolutionary path; the colours of the Rainbow Nation have difficulty blending together; the wealthy elites (white, black or Indian) profit from de facto segregation.

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.

It was clear to me as a civil rights leader in the '60s that unless we put the social and economic underpinnings beneath the political and the civil rights, we wouldn't go anywhere.

One can't erase the tremendous burden of apartheid in 10 years, 20 years, I believe, even 30 years.

Being black, I'm involved in the reparations movement. It's focused toward the African-American audience. We could begin to heal.

My father’s contemporaries, the white ones…had made laws that he must carry a reference book. They also made a law that an Alsatian dog must have a certain ticket on his neck (a dog license) and he must also carry a ‘reference book’. That Alsatian dog was going to die without ever deciding a law that governs his life. So was my father…The discomfort of prison cells is better than the emptiness of walking in the streets as if you were free when you are a dog in the land of your birth.

Who will deny that thirty years of my life have been spent knocking in vain, patiently, moderately and modestly at a closed and barred door? What have been the fruits of moderation? The past thirty years have seen the greatest number of laws restricting our rights and progress, until today we have reached a stage where we have almost no rights at all.

We should be lords over them…these are the politics of South Africa.

Not only are whites kicking us; they are telling us how to react to being kicked.

Labor in white skin cannot be free so long as labor in a black skin is branded.

There are no limits to which powers of privilege will not go to keep the workers in slavery.

There is a moral fitness in the idea of returning to Africa her children, whose ancestors have been torn from her by the ruthless hand of fraud and violence

While boasting of our noble deeds we’re careful to conceal the ugly fact that by an iniquitous money system we have nationalized a system of oppression which, though more refined, is not less cruel than the old system of chattel slavery.

Poverty Corrodes Freedom

We used to wage war on poverty—not poor people.

Imposing economic sanctions is declaring economic warfare on the people of South Africa.

The free world wants to feed South Africa to the Red Crocodile, to appease its hunger.