Some of my Favourite Quotes

Not an exhaustive list:

"Dipped in chocolate,
Bronzed with elegance,
Enamelled with grace,
Toasted with beauty.
My Lord, she is a Black Woman!"
-Yosef Ben-Jochannan

Listen or your tongue will keep you deaf.
-Native American Proverb

Sorrow shared is halved. Joy shared is doubled.
-Native American Saying

"Seduce my mind and you can have my body. Find my soul and I’m yours forever."
-Anonymous

"Since the time of Homer every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric"
-Edward Said

“Remember the solidarity shown to Palestine here and everywhere... and remember also that there is a cause to which many people have committed themselves, difficulties and terrible obstacles notwithstanding. Why? Because it is a just cause, a noble ideal, a moral quest for equality and human rights.”
-Edward Said

"My final prayer: oh my body, make me always a man who asks questions"
-Frantz Fanon

“He replied that he suddenly felt overcome at the thought that he had to stand there, before the assembled representatives of African nationalist movements, to try and persuade them that the Algerian cause was important, at a time when men were dying and being tortured in his country for a cause whose justice ought to command automatic support from rational and progressive human beings.”
-Peter Worsely, Professor of Sociology at the University of Manchester speaking of Fanon’s reply to his question of why Fanon had appeared to break down while delivering an address to the Conference on Positive Action in Accra, Ghana, 1960.

“As far as I knew white women were never lonely, except in books. White men adored them, Black men desired them and Black women worked for them.”
-Maya Angelou

“The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.”
-George Bernard Shaw

Why should we take advice on sex from the pope? If he knows anything about it, he shouldn't!
-George Bernard Shaw

“A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”
-Mark Twain

“Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.”
-Noam Chomsky

“Resistance is feasible even for those who are not heroes by nature, and it is an obligation, I believe, for those who fear the consequences and detest the reality of the attempt to impose American hegemony.”
-Noam Chomsky

“Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it.”
-Noam Chomsky

“You're not to be so blind with patriotism that you can't face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or says it.”
-Malcolm X

"I'm not going to sit at your table and watch you eat, with nothing on my plate, and call myself a diner. Sitting at the table doesn't make you a diner, unless you eat some of what's on that plate. Being here in America doesn't make you an American.... No I'm not an American, I'm one of the 22 million black people who are the victims of Americanism. One of the 22 million black people who are the victims of democracy, nothing but disguised hypocrisy.... I'm speaking as a victim of this American system. And I see America through the eyes of a victim. I don't see any American dream; I see an American nightmare."
-Malcolm X

“I am America. I am the part you won't recognize. But get used to me. Black, confident, cocky; my name, not yours; my religion, not yours; my goals, my own; get used to me.”
-Muhummad Ali

Fifty Years of Ghanaian Independence

Today is fifty years since Ghana gained independence from Britain. I don’t feel entirely comfortable saying "happy fiftieth birthday" because it seems to diminish centuries of history. It somehow implies that Ghana only came into existence fifty years ago. Ghana the modern state with its defined international borders may have become an entity fifty years ago, but Ghana, the ancient Western African Empire goes back hundreds of years, to a time when Europe was still in darkness! Needless to say, it was the first place in sub-Saharan Africa where the Europeans arrived and started trading in gold and slaves and began to enrich themselves. It was also the first black country nation in Africa to gain independence from colonial rule and within three years, another seventeen African countries had won independence. Not a bad trend to have started!

Coincidentally, as Ghana celebrates fifty years of independence on March 6th, March 25th marks the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade by Britain, another occasion for Africa and the peoples of the African diaspora to commemorate.