Are you there, Africa with the bulging chest and oblong thigh? Sulking Africa, wrought of iron, in the fire, Africa of the million...s of royal slaves, deported Africa, drifting continent, are you there? Slowly you vanish, you withdraw into the past, into the tales of castaways, colonial museums, the works of scholars.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Where do whites fit in the New Africa? Nowhere, I'm inclined to say ... and I do believe that it is true that even the gentlest an...d most westernised Africans would like the emotional idea of the continent entirely without the complication of the presence of the white man for a generation or two. But nowhere, as an answer for us whites, is in the same category as remarks like What's the use of living? in the face of the threat of atomic radiation. We are living; we are in Africa.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
So 'ere's to you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, at your 'ome in the Soudan; You're a pore benighted 'eathen but a first-class fightin' man; ... />An' 'ere's to you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, with your 'ayrick 'ead of 'air-- You big black boundin' beggar--for you broke a British square!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For my father, who used to sit, hour after hour, night after night, outside our house in Africa, watching the stars "Well," he wou...ld say, "if we blow ourselves up, there's plenty more where we came from!"LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Before I left home seven years ago I used to walk endlessly at night along the streets, tormented because there was a barrier betw...een me and the steady solemn magnificence of those skies whose brilliance beat the thin little town into the soil. I saw them, but I was alien to them. This barrier is the urgent necessity of doing the next thing, of getting on with the business of living; whatever it is that drives us on. But on that first night there was no barrier, nothing; and I was effortlessly and at once in immediate intimacy with the soil and its creatures.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Now I must write personally; but I would not, if I didn't know that nothing we can say about ourselves is personal. I read the nov...el when I was fourteen or so; understanding very well the isolation described in it; responding to her sense of Africa the magnificent--mine, and everyone's who knows Africa; realizing that this was one of the few rare books. For it is in that small number of novels, with Moby Dick, Jude the Obscure, Wuthering Heights, perhaps one or two others, which is on a frontier of the human mind.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When old settlers say "One has to understand the country," what they mean is, "You have to get used to our ideas about the native...." They are saying, in effect, "Learn our ideas, or otherwise get out; we don't want you."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »