Es’kia Mphahlele

Afrikans, let us find ourselves happening to events, instead of always responding to events happening to us.

You’ll come back and be able to look after yourself and the two you’re leaving behind.

About eight out of every ten educated Africans, most of whom are also professed Christians, still believe firmly in the spirits of their ancestors.

Common suffering unites. But when suffering becomes intolerably acute, when it reduces people to abject, dehumanising poverty and insecurity, suffering disunites.

I am an irrepressible teacher, and will teach anywhere I am invited to, as long as I am not asked to play the role of a token nigger.

In Southern Africa, the black writer talks best about the ghetto life he knows; the white writer best about his own ghetto life. We see each other, black and white, as it were through a keyhole.

When they were not working they had children without being able to secure a man they could really call a husband.

The Black man must enter the white man’s house through the back door. The Black man does most of the dirty work… Black man cleans the streets but mustn’t walk freely on the pavement; Black man must build houses for the white man but cannot live in them; Black man cooks the white man’s food but eats what is left over.

The African sage says nothing belongs to you except what you have eaten: that is the only thing you can be sure of.

We’d never really known father before. And now living close to him and seeing him at close quarters, I realised that his face was unlikeable.