Kevin Macdonald Quotes

I have always regarded myself, in the first place, as an African patriot.

I submerged myself in all the information that I could find about Idi Amin. I mean, before I left Los Angeles, I was studying Kiswahili. I was working on the dialect. I was studying every documentary and tape of him that I could find - not just visual, but also audiocassettes, even in other languages when he was speaking in other dialects.

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

I've always said that even before Cameroon, I belong to Africa.

Japan is not a Western democracy. The Japanese have kept their traditions, culture and heritage, but they have joined the community of free nations.

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

Because I am an African, I am a Ghanaian.

When I was growing up, I despised Irishness. I felt our music, our television and our books were just poor imitations of what came out of Britain and America. I was all set to abandon it entirely.

Inside me I'm Ghanaian, and I'm proud to be African. But of course I'm Italian. I was born in Italy. I've never been to Africa in my life, but I will go one day.

Ireland is such a young society. The British were the ruling class up until they left about a hundred years ago, and we've been trying to work out what our class hierarchy is ever since.

When Marcus Garvey died in 1940, the role of the British Empire was already being challenged by India and the rising expectations of her African colonies. Marcus Garvey's avocation of African redemption and the restoration of the African state's sovereign political entity in world affairs was still a dream without fulfillment.

We, as Americans, at least - I mean, I love my country - but we're so self-righteous sometimes, in terms of, like, our nationality, our country. But we're people from somewhere else; the true 'Americans' are the original peoples. It's funny, but we're a very territorial species.

To come to England in the 1970s was to return to this strange other-world of half-known history. I found the imperial architecture curiously familiar: the post office, the town hall, the botanic gardens.

Oh, I do understand so well. That’s just how we feel about them in Scotland.

Africa for the Africans.

These natives prefer the name of Americans to that of Creoles, since the peace of Versailles, and particularly since 1789, one often hears them say with pride: “I am not a Spaniard, I am an American.”

It is the fight for national existence which sets culture moving and opens to it the doors of creation. Later on it is the nation which will ensure the conditions and framework necessary to culture

The President of Iran is a genocidal maniac.

I shall yet live to see it an English nation.

The Iraqis have a country that inherited cultures thousands of years old while the Americans have a culture only two hundred years old. Two hundred years will teach thousands of years? Oh Americans, leave Iraq for its people.

Where a Serb dwells, there is Serbia.

When I went to college - when I read Shakespeare or Dickens or Scott - I just felt that, as a citizen of England, a British citizen, this was as much my heritage as any schoolboy's. That is one of the things the Empire taught, that apart from citizenship, the synonymous inheritance of the citizenship was the literature.

Israel is too attached to America, too influenced by America. It should be connected to Europe. America is based on mythology - the free man, the individual, the open frontier. Europe is more conscious of history. Take Britain and Shakespeare. You shape your identity through history.

People looked up to us for our values and leadership. But today, they laugh as we are busy debating whether one of the seven wonders of the world, the Taj Mahal, was actually built by Indians.

I'm not British. I'm not American. I'm not French. Whatever thing they practise, that is their business. I am an African. I am Rwandese.