Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o

“Belief in yourself is more important than endless worries of what others think of you. Value yourself and others will value you. Validation is best that comes from within.”

“Written words can also sing.”

“Then change the world. Give it a soul.”

“I am human, i am a human being, a soul, and not a piece of garbage, no matter how poor and ragged I look, and I deserve respect, he heard himself say, time and again as he descended to and repossessed his body."”

“It's terrible when the old have to bury the young. But it is more terrible when neither the old nor the young are there to bury each other.”

“That was one of the most rewarding things about spending nights in the open. Birds were bound to wake you up, and whether they carried good or bad luck, at least they woke you up with music.”

“for I had reached a point in my life when I came to view words differently. A closer look at language could reveal the secret of life.”

“I believe that black has been oppressed by white; female by male; peasant by landlord; and worker by lord of capital. It follows from this that the black female worker and peasant is the most oppressed. She is oppressed on account of her color like all black people in the world; she is oppressed on account of her gender like all women in the world; and she is exploited and oppressed on account of her class like all workers and peasants in the world. Three burdens she has to carry.”

“Your own actions are a better mirror of your life than the actions of all your enemies put together.”

“Stories, like food, lose their flavor if cooked in a hurry.”

“The condition of women in a nation is the real measure of its progress.”

“Africa actually enriches Europe: but Africa is made to believe that it needs Europe to rescue it from poverty. Africa's natural and human resources continue to develop Europe and America: but Africa is made to feel grateful for aid from the same quarters that still sit on the back of the continent.”

“The European missionary believed too much in his mission of conquest not to communicate it in the languages most readily available to the people: the African writer believes too much in 'African literature' to write it in those ethnic, divisive and underdeveloped languages of the peasantry!”

“What is the difference between a politician who says Africa cannot do without imperialism and the writer who says Africa cannot do without European languages?”

“But African languages refused to die. They would not simply go to the way of Latin to become the fossils for linguistic archaeology to dig up, classify, and argue about the international conferences.”

“Colonialism imposed its control of the social production of wealth through military conquest and subsequent political dictatorship. But its most important area of domination was the mental universe of the colonised, the control, through culture, of how people perceived themselves and their relationship to the world. Economic and political control can never be complete or effective without mental control. To control a people's culture is to control their tools of self-definition in relationship to others.”

“African countries, as colonies and even today as neo-colonies, came to be defined and to define themselves in terms of the languages of Europe: English-speaking, French-speaking or Portuguese-speaking African countries.”

“Different! Different! Puu! They are all alike. Those coated with the white clay of the white man’s ways are the worst. They have nothing inside.”

“Stay well, Son. Go well and in peace, Mother.”

“Look, Sister,You know I want the boy to grow in the Lord.”