Hugh Masekela Quotes

My parents did not want us to lose our culture and our language. And that was a good thing.

If we deny our culture and become nothing and everything, that weakens us.

My work is as an ethnographic rescuer: a conduit between past and future generations. The urgency of this effort cannot be overstated.

So we have to be careful because if you don't protect your culture you won't have it for very long.

Whole generations have forgotten history.

For a long time, I've been interested in cultural memory and historical erasure.

If we lose our culture, we lose our memory.

Most of my family doesn't speak English. It's so important for the baby. He's going to know all his American roots, but he also needs to know about his Brazilian side.

I changed my name when we became aware of the African revolution and the whole question of our African roots.

My parents would dress us up in traditional Vietnamese clothing to go to school for heritage day. We have a Vietnamese nanny that my parents wanted us to have so we could stay in touch and know where we came from.

To speak about yourself, you must first be able to assemble a sense of origin. For descendants of slaves, this has proved one of the most precious losses of self-knowledge we've endured.

I think that's something that we as black people in this country have been robbed of. I compare it to my brother's wife, who is Hispanic. She was born in America but her parents are from Honduras. She speaks Spanish. She knows the culture. But most black people, we were robbed of that. We don't know our heritage.

Within a language, you have your roots, your culture, and I think and dream in Bassa. We have 260 languages in Cameroon, but the official ones are French and English.

I lost my accent pretty quickly, so everyone assumes I was born and raised in America. But I'm very much still in touch with my Filipino roots. That will never go away.

It is good to be well connected with English language, literature and history, but the knowledge of our culture and roots is equally important.

Culture is being threatened when all worldly objects and things, produced by the present or the past, are treated as mere functions for the life process of society, as though they are there only to fulfill some need, and for this functionalization it is almost irrelevant whether the needs in question are of a high or a low order.

Language is the expression of ideas, and if the people of one country cannot preserve an identity of ideas they cannot retain an identity of language.

For the first time since I began acting, I feel that I've found my place in the world, that there's something out of my own culture which i can express and perhaps help others preserve..i have found out now that the African natives had a definite culture a long way beyond the culture of the Stone age...an integrated thing, which is still unspoiled by western influences...I think the Americans will be amazed to find how many of the modern dance steps are relics of African heritage.

My grandfather lived to be 96 years old. He was born in a town outside of Salerno in Southern Italy. He came to New York when he was 20. He lived in the States from age 20 to 96, but he brought his culture with him, he brought his food with him, he brought his language with him, he never spoke a word of English.

I be off the slave ships, building pyramids, writing my own hieroglyphs

Every people, in order to remain healthy and strong, has to have a grasp of its foundation story. Culture is a chrysalis - it is protective, it takes care of you. That's what cultures are for. You cannot rob a people of language, culture, mother, father, the value of their labor - all of that - without doing vast damage to those people.

I may speak many languages, but there remains one in which I live.

I was like the only diverse kid in my high school, and I'm half-Puerto Rican. But yeah, I have a huge family and tons of cousins in Puerto Rico. We actually hung out with them last summer, and it was awesome. But I wish my grandfather had taught my dad Spanish when he was younger so he could've taught me when I was younger, and sometimes he does, too. It's a shame.

I think that is what we do by preserving and telling our stories. If you don't tell your stories, other people will tell their story about you. It's important that we nurture and protect these memories. Things change. Existence means change. So, the kind of precious memories about being black for my generation won't exist for my kids' and grandkids' generations unless we preserve them through fiction, through film, through comic books, and every other form of media we can possibly utilize to perpetuate the story of the great African-American people.

No nation can survive without passing its heritage, language and, yes, faith to the next generation. A country must be built on something substantial and if the cultural elitists think it can be built on 'diversity,' that is a foundation of shifting sand.