Africa Funny Quotes

Mr. Right is coming, but he's in Africa and he's walking.

A relationship is likely to last way longer, if each partner convinces or has convinced themselves that they do not deserve their partner, even if that is not true.

Some people avoid thinking deeply in public, only because they are afraid of coming across as suicidal.

Some of us were brought into this troubled world primarily or only to increase our fathers’ chances of not being left by our mothers, or vice versa.

A premature death does not only rob one of the countless instances where one would have experienced pleasure, it also saves one from the innumerable instances where one would have experienced pain.

The most upsetting thing about Society’s attitude towards disabled people is that many millions of disabled people became disabled while trying to please Society, the very same bitch that secretly regards them as subhuman.

Life is a process during which one initially gets less and less dependent, independent, and then more and more dependent.

Some people will hate you for not loving them.

We are way less likely to love someone just because they love us than we are to hate someone just because they hate us.

Some people hate people who are overconfident, only because their overconfidence reminds them of their underconfidence.

Most sane human beings who are over the age of six usually act or react not as per what they genuinely feel or really think but in accordance with the expectations of those around them.

Patriotism is the narcissism of countries.

Not everyone who talks less or keeps quiet whenever they are with or around you does that because they find you interesting or knowledgeable; some people do that because they find you boring or ignorant.

Adults who use big words in order to seem intelligent are annoying, especially those who are not intelligent.

The world economy would collapse if a significant number of people were to realize and then act on the realization that it is possible to enjoy many if not most of the things that they enjoy without first having to own them.

Most men would no longer enjoy conversing with most women if they stopped bringing their vaginas along.

The fact that the person who you are sleeping with is also sleeping with another person or other people does not necessarily mean that he or she does not love you. And the fact that you are the only person who someone is sleeping with does not necessarily mean that he or she loves you.

In reality most human beings are not, to most human beings, more important than money.

In some cases, you can tell how somebody is being treated by their own boss from the way they are treating someone to whom they are a boss.

Among other possibilities, money was invented to make it possible for a foolish man to control wise men; a weak man, strong men; a child, old men; an ignorant man, knowledgeable men; and for a dwarf to control giants.

Death devours not only those who have been cooked by old age; it also feasts on those who are half-cooked and even those who are raw.

If we were not impressed by job titles, suits, and jargon, we would demand that financial advisors show us their personal bank statements before they tell us what we could or should do with our own money.

Many if not most slaves would have each readily jumped, and many if not most slaves would each readily jump, at the opportunity to be a master, if such an opportunity presents or had presented itself.

Bigheadedness is usually a symptom of small-mindedness.

To some believers, being on the pill or using a condom is a nonverbal way of telling God to go to hell.

A seemingly simple task like taking a bath or wearing a condom feels like multitasking to someone who suffers from hemiplegia or has only one hand.

There are children in Africa, starving to death, and you don't hear them whinging.

The last time everyone loved or at least liked everyone was when the world had a population of about 4.

The average adult has had sex innumerable times more than they have formed an opinion of their own.

Being rich or famous is the only profound thing that some people have ever said.

We're all on our own, aren't we? That's what it boils down to. We come into this world on our own- in Hawaii, as I did, or New York, or China, or Africa or Montana- and we leave it in the same way, on our own, wherever we happen to be at the time- in a plane, in our beds, in a car, in a space shuttle, or in a field of flowers. And between those times, we try to connect along the way with others who are also on their own. If we're lucky, we have a mother who reads to us. We have a teacher or two along the way who make us feel special. We have dogs who do the stupid dog tricks we teach them and who lie on our bed when we're not looking, because it smells like us, and so we pretend not to notice the paw prints on the bedspread. We have friends who lend us their favorite books. Maybe we have children, and grandchildren, and funny mailmen and eccentric great-aunts, and uncles who can pull pennies out of their ears. All of them teach us stuff. They teach us about combustion engines and the major products of Bolivia, and what poems are not boring, and how to be kind to each other, and how to laugh, and when the vigil is in our hands, and when we have to make the best of things even though it's hard sometimes. Looking back together, telling our stories to one another, we learn how to be on our own.

Millions of business people are each constantly forced to choose between their desire to not be a bad person and their desire to be a good business person, that is to say, to make as much money as they possibly can by maximizing their revenue while minimizing the cost of producing whatever it is that they sell.

Many a survivor of a plane crash who is or was against cannibalism and had never eaten human flesh once found themselves in a situation where they had to either eat human flesh, or go the way of all flesh.

Most human beings strongly believe that money is way less important than the life of a human being, but in reality five hundred, fifty, or even five dollars are way more important to the lives of most human beings than the lives of most human beings.

Greed is a contagious mental illness without which civilization as we know it would not have been possible.

There is nothing morally wrong with buying stolen goods, unless you know that they were stolen.

Not a few millions of parents strongly hope that their own children will step in by instantly becoming their own parents’ foster parents, if and when the parents reach their second childhood.

Many a parent, sad to say, has used their child as an opportunity for them, the parent, to do, through their child, something or some of the things that they, the parent, did not do or did not do successfully.

For their never-ending endeavours to obtain or retain wealth, countries desperately need companies, because they—unlike most human beings—have the means of production, and human beings, because they—unlike all companies—have the means of reproduction.

Some people are each holding on to a lover of theirs who no longer loves them and/or who they no longer love, only because they do not want to have a reason or another reason to be jealous of the person who would eventually be their lover if they let go of them.

We, in the interest of the so-called progress, have been persuaded to leave the production and at times the cooking of our food to companies whose owners and employees make a living by exploiting our busyness or laziness and our innate hunger to continue living.

Most of us cling to life as if our existence were a result of our deed or choice.

Although they probably know that some children were used and some children are used as miners, most adults are ignorant of the chocolate industry’s use of minors.

Most human beings would have never been pained by the death of a human being if they had never seen a human being or pretending to be pained by that.

Loneliness tortures many if not most of the elderly more intensely and more frequently than it torments many if not most of us who will never be or have not yet been pushed or pulled into old age.

Most sane human beings who have managed to attain and retain fame each uses it to dramatically increase their name’s chances of being remembered until Jesus comes back, since their heart cannot do what they consciously or unconsciously lust for, that is to say, for it to beat until Jesus returns.

Just like how most if not all poor boys look up to and aspire to someday be rich men, most if not all underdeveloped and developing countries look up to and aspire to someday be developed countries.

Many millions of pregnancies—many if not most of which have each led to the birth of at least one child—were each used as nothing but a conspicuous means to a secret end called the evasion of abortion.

We know that there are many animals on this continent not found in the Old World. These must have been carried from here to the ark, and then brought back afterwards. Were the peccary, armadillo, ant-eater, sloth, agouti, vampire-bat, marmoset, howling and prehensile-tailed monkey, the raccoon and muskrat carried by the angels from America to Asia? How did they get there? Did the polar bear leave his field of ice and journey toward the tropics? How did he know where the ark was? Did the kangaroo swim or jump from Australia to Asia? Did the giraffe, hippopotamus, antelope and orang-outang journey from Africa in search of the ark? Can absurdities go farther than this?

When selecting a one-night stand, a heterosexual woman who is materialistic is a trillion times more likely to choose a sexually unattractive poor man who seems rich over a sexually attractive rich man who seems poor.

To ask a man whether or not he has a girlfriend is to talk about his sex life. If you disagree with that, then how in the name of God do you differentiate between a man’s girlfriend and a girl that is a friend to the man?

As we all know, as if forever exploiting or attempting to exploit each other were not enough, a group of sane human beings who have just reached the end of a war against a common enemy of theirs will sooner or later start or continue killing and/or fighting against each other.

Boredom is probably more frequent and more tormenting if you do not have sight or hands.

For a sane person to sincerely be happy that someone has succeeded, they have to either be profiting or likely to profit from that person’s success, or be that person.

More often than not, expecting to lose weight without first losing the diet that made the weight loss necessary is like expecting a pig to be spotless after hosing it down while it was still rolling in mud.

Some people would have killed themselves and/or someone else if they were single; and some people would not have done that.

It goes without saying that even those of us who are going to hell will get eternal life—if that territory really exists outside religious books and the minds of believers, that is. Having said that, given the choice, instead of being grilled until hell freezes over, the average sane human being would, needless to say, rather spend forever idling in an extremely fertile garden, next to a lamb or a chicken or a parrot, which they do not secretly want to eat, and a lion or a tiger or a crocodile, which does not secretly want to eat them.

More often than not, an inspirational or motivational speaker is someone who makes money from telling us that we can do all of the things that we can do … and pretty much all of the things that we cannot do.

Twenty-five years from now all religion will be fundamentalist religion, even the Church of England. Wild-eyed “Tutuist” Anglicans will riot in Anzania (formerly the Union of South Africa). They’ll force people to play contract bridge at gunpoint and make unbelievers eat little sandwiches with the crusts cut off. No woman will dare appear in the street without a small, stupid hat like Queen Di’s.

Funny the things which civilization has to offer when one misses. Flooring is a lovely thing. Gives one confidence. During my five weeks' occupancy the mud floor stayed wet in spite of great care on my part not to slop the water again. It never did properly dry, because the hut was necessarily dark. No direct sun came in, and the humidity was so terrific that even in direct sunlight nothing ever dried out. Curious to live on a slippery surface. A floor is a very important item.

As an unavoidable result of the inevitable loss of some physical and/or some mental abilities, many a man who has been alive for many years has become a boy again.

Millions of sane people would each be sexually attracted to their own parent or child if they were not related to them.

A funny thing happened while I was teaching my younger siblings about Black culture and history: I began to feel even more connected to it myself. I began to see the world through Black eyes, and anything that had to do with Blackness or Africa always grabbed my attention.

The English went out and conquered a quarter of the Earth just to escape the rain. They always went for the hot places – Australia, Africa, India. But here’s the funny thing about the English … many of them like to take a bit of their Englishness with them wherever they go. All around the world these sad people build English pubs and serve ‘Full English Breakfasts’ in the morning and ‘Fish and Chips’ for lunch or dinner (or both). Some of them don’t seem to trust ‘foreign’ people, which is a bit odd. ALL the people in England were ‘foreign’ at one time.

Mark Twain was neither an anarchist nor a radical. By 1900, at sixty-five, he was a world-acclaimed writer of funny-serious-American-to-the-bone stories. He watched the United States and other Western countries go about the world and wrote in the New York Herald as the century began: “I bring you the stately matron named Christendom, returning bedraggled, besmirched, and dishonored from pirate raids in Kiao-Chou, Manchuria, South Africa, and the Philippines, with her soul full of meanness, her pocket full of boodle, and her mouth full of pious hypocrisies.

I think fairies are all awfully sad,” she said. “Poor fairies.” “This was sort of funny though,” David said. “Because this worthless man that taught Tommy backgammon was explaining to Tommy what it meant to be a fairy and all about the Greeks and Damon and Pythias and David and Jonathan. You know, sort of like when they tell you about the fish and the roe and the milt and the bees fertilizing the pollen and all that at school and Tommy asked him if he’d ever read a book by Gide. What was it called, Mr. Davis? Not Corydon. That other one? With Oscar Wilde in it.” “Si le grain ne meurt,” Roger said. “It’s a pretty dreadful book that Tommy took to read the boys in school. They couldn’t understand it in French, of course, but Tommy used to translate it. Lots of it is awfully dull but it gets pretty dreadful when Mr. Gide gets to Africa.” “I’ve read it,” the girl said. “Oh fine,” David said. “Then you know the sort of thing I mean. Well this man who’d taught Tommy backgammon and turned out to be a fairy was awfully surprised when Tommy spoke about this book but he was sort of pleased because now he didn’t have to go through all the part about the bees and flowers of that business and he said, ‘I’m so glad you know,’ or something like that and then Tommy said this to him exactly; I memorized it: ‘Mr. Edwards, I take only an academic interest in homosexuality. I thank you very much for teaching me backgammon and I must bid you good day.

The book I was reading was this book I took out of the library by mistake. They gave me the wrong book, and I didn't notice it till I got back to my room. They gave me Out of Africa, by Isak Dinesen. I thought it was going to stink, but it didn’t. It was a very good book. I’m quite illiterate, but I read a lot. My favorite author is my brother D.B., and my next favorite is Ring Lardner. My brother gave me a book by Ring Lardner for my birthday, just before I went to Pencey. It had these very funny, crazy plays in it, and then it had this one story about a traffic cop that falls in love with this very cute girl that's always speeding. Only, he's married, the cop, so he can't marry her or anything. Then this girl gets killed, because she's always speeding. That story just about killed me. What I like best is a book that’s at least funny once in a while. I read a lot of classical books, like The Return of the Native and all, and I like them, and I read a lot of war books and mysteries and all, but they don’t knock me out too much. What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though. I wouldn’t mind calling this Isak Dinesen up. And Ring Lardner, except that D.B. told me he’s dead. You take that book Of Human Bondage, by Somerset Maugham, though. I read it last summer. It’s a pretty good book and all, but I wouldn’t want to call Somerset Maugham up. I don’t know. He just isn’t the kind of a guy I’d want to call up, that’s all. I’d rather call old Thomas Hardy up. I like that Eustacia Vye.

Did I ever tell you about the man who taught his asshole to talk? His whole abdomen would move up and down you dig farting out the words. It was unlike anything I ever heard. This ass talk had sort of a gut frequency. It hit you right down there like you gotta go. You know when the old colon gives you the elbow and it feels sorta cold inside, and you know all you have to do is turn loose? Well this talking hit you right down there, a bubbly, thick stagnant sound, a sound you could smell. This man worked for a carnival you dig, and to start with it was like a novelty ventriliquist act. Real funny, too, at first. He had a number he called “The Better ‘Ole” that was a scream, I tell you. I forget most of it but it was clever. Like, “Oh I say, are you still down there, old thing?” “Nah I had to go relieve myself.” After a while the ass start talking on its own. He would go in without anything prepared and his ass would ad-lib and toss the gags back at him every time. Then it developed sort of teeth-like little raspy in-curving hooks and started eating. He thought this was cute at first and built an act around it, but the asshole would eat its way through his pants and start talking on the street, shouting out it wanted equal rights. It would get drunk, too, and have crying jags nobody loved it and it wanted to be kissed same as any other mouth. Finally it talked all the time day and night, you could hear him for blocks screaming at it to shut up, and beating it with his fist, and sticking candles up it, but nothing did any good and the asshole said to him: “It’s you who will shut up in the end. Not me. Because we dont need you around here any more. I can talk and eat and shit.” After that he began waking up in the morning with a transparent jelly like a tadpole’s tail all over his mouth. This jelly was what the scientists call un-D.T., Undifferentiated Tissue, which can grow into any kind of flesh on the human body. He would tear it off his mouth and the pieces would stick to his hands like burning gasoline jelly and grow there, grow anywhere on him a glob of it fell. So finally his mouth sealed over, and the whole head would have have amputated spontaneous — (did you know there is a condition occurs in parts of Africa and only among Negroes where the little toe amputates spontaneously?) — except for the eyes you dig. Thats one thing the asshole couldn’t do was see. It needed the eyes. But nerve connections were blocked and infiltrated and atrophied so the brain couldn’t give orders any more. It was trapped in the skull, sealed off. For a while you could see the silent, helpless suffering of the brain behind the eyes, then finally the brain must have died, because the eyes went out, and there was no more feeling in them than a crab’s eyes on the end of a stalk.

It was certainly true that I had “no sense of humour” in that I found nothing funny. I didn’t know, and perhaps would never know, the feeling of compulsion to exhale and convulse in the very specific way that humans evolved to do. Nor did I know the specific emotion of relief that is bound to it. But it would be wrong, I think, to say that I was incapable of using humour as a tool. As I understood it, humour was a social reflex. The ancestors of humans had been ape-animals living in small groups in Africa. Groups that worked together were more likely to survive and have offspring, so certain reflexes and perceptions naturally emerged to signal between members of the group. Yawning evolved to signal wake-rest cycles. Absence of facial hair and the dilation of blood vessels in the face evolved to signal embarrassment, anger, shame and fear. And laughter evolved to signal an absence of danger. If a human is out with a friend and they are approached by a dangerous-looking stranger, having that stranger revealed as benign might trigger laughter. I saw humour as the same reflex turned inward, serving to undo the effects of stress on the body by activating the parasympathetic nervous system. Interestingly, it also seemed to me that humour had extended, like many things, beyond its initial evolutionary context. It must have been very quickly adopted by human ancestor social systems. If a large human picks on a small human there’s a kind of tension that emerges where the tribe wonders if a broader violence will emerge. If a bystander watches and laughs they are non-verbally signaling to the bully that there’s no need for concern, much like what had occurred minutes before with my comments about Myrodyn, albeit in a somewhat different context. But humour didn’t stop there. Just as a human might feel amusement at things which seem bad but then actually aren’t, they might feel amusement at something which merely has the possibility of being bad, but doesn’t necessarily go through the intermediate step of being consciously evaluated as such: a sudden realization. Sudden realizations that don’t incur any regret were, in my opinion, the most alien form of humour, even if I could understand how they linked back to the evolutionary mechanism. A part of me suspected that this kind of surprise-based or absurdity-based humour had been refined by sexual selection as a signal of intelligence. If your prospective mate is able to offer you regular benign surprises it would (if you were human) not only feel good, but show that they were at least in some sense smarter or wittier than you, making them a good choice for a mate. The role of surprise and non-verbal signalling explained, by my thinking, why explaining humour was so hard for humans. If one explained a joke it usually ceased to be a surprise, and in situations where the laughter served as an all-clear-no-danger signal, explaining that verbally would crush the impulse to do it non-verbally.

And immediately we rushed like horses, wild with the knowledge of this song, and bolted into a startingly loud harmony: 'Rule Britannia, Britannia rules the waves; Britons, never-never-ne-verr shall be slaves!' and singing, I saw the kings and the queens in the room with us, laughing in a funny way, and smiling and happy with us. The headmaster was soaked in glee. And I imagined all the glories of Britannia, who, or what or which, had brought us out of the ships crossing over from the terrible seas from Africa, and had placed us on this island, and had given us such good headmasters and assistant masters, and such a nice vicar to teach us how to pray to God - and he had come from England; and such nice white people who lived on the island with us, and who gave us jobs watering their gardens and taking out their garbage, most of which we found delicious enough to eat...all through the ages, all through the years of history; from the Tudors on the wall, down through the Stuarts also on the wall, all through the Elizabethans and including those men and women singing in their hearts with us, hanging dead and distant on our schoolroom walls; Britannia, who, or what or which, had ruled the waves all these hundreds of years, all these thousands and millions of years, and kept us on the island, happy - the island of Barbados (Britannia the Second), free from all invasions. Not even the mighty Germans; not even the Russians whom our headmaster said were dressed in red, had dared to come within submarine distance of our island! Britannia who saw to it that all Britons (we on the island were, beyond doubt, little black Britons, just like the white big Britons up in Britannialand. The headmaster told us so!) - never-never-ne-verr, shall be slaves!

State wants the alleged techniques, presumably.” “I’ve been wondering about that,” Norman said. “I wonder if we do want them.” “How do you mean?” “It’s a bit difficult to explain … Look, have you been following television at all since you came home?” “Occasionally, but since the Yatakang news broke I’ve been much too busy to catch more than an occasional news bulletin.” “So have I, but—well, I guess I’m more familiar with the way trends get started here nowadays, so I can extrapolate from the couple or three programmes I have had time for.” Norman’s gaze moved over Elihu’s head to the far corner of the room. “Engrelay Satelserv blankets most of Africa, doesn’t it?” “The whole continent, I’d say. There are English-speaking people in every country on Earth nowadays, except possibly for China.” “So you’re acquainted with Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere?” “Yes, of course—these two who always appear in station identification slots, doing exotic and romantic things.” “Did you have a personalised set at any time, with your own identity matted into the Everywhere image?” “Lord, no! It costs—what? About five thousand bucks, isn’t it?” “About that. I haven’t got one either; the basic fee is for couple service, and being a bachelor I’ve never bothered. I just have the standard brownnose identity on my set.” He hesitated. “And—to be absolutely frank—a Scandahoovian one for the shiggy half of the pair. But I’ve watched friends’ sets plenty of times where they had the full service, and I tell you it’s eerie. There’s something absolutely unique and indescribable about seeing your own face and hearing your own voice, matted into the basic signal. There you are wearing clothes you’ve never owned, doing things you’ve never done in places you’ve never been, and it has the immediacy of real life because nowadays television is the real world. You catch? We’re aware of the scale of the planet, so we don’t accept that our own circumscribed horizons constitute reality. Much more real is what’s relayed to us by the TV.” “I can well understand that,” Elihu nodded. “And of course I’ve seen this on other people’s sets too. Also I agree entirely about what we regard as real. But I thought we were talking about the Yatakangi claim?” “I still am,” Norman said. “Do you have a homimage attachment on your set? No, obviously not. I do. This does the same thing except with your environment; when they—let’s see … Ah yes! When they put up something like the splitscreen cuts they use to introduce SCANALYZER, one of the cuts is always what they call the ‘digging’ cut, and shows Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere sitting in your home wearing your faces watching the same programme you’re about to watch. You know this one?” “I don’t think they have this service in Africa yet,” Elihu said. “I know the bit you mean, but it always shows a sort of idealised dream-home full of luxy gadgetry.” “That used to be what they did here,” Norman said. “Only nowadays practically every American home is full of luxy gadgetry. You know Chad’s definition of the New Poor? People who are too far behind with time-payments on next year’s model to make the down-payment on the one for the year after?” Elihu chuckled, then grew grave. “That’s too nearly literal to be funny,” he said. “Prophet’s beard, it certainly is! I found time to look over some of Chad’s books after Guinevere’s party, and … Well, having met him I was inclined to think he was a conceited blowhard, but now I think he’s entitled to every scrap of vanity he likes to put on.

Ghana was a thoroughly triumphal visit for Malcolm X, with exception of one sour event: As Malcolm was departing from his hotel on the way to the airport, he bumped into Muhammad Ali, who was touring West Africa, and Ali snubbed him. Later Ali eagerly expressed his unconditional loyalty to Elijah Muhammad, ridiculing Malcolm to a New York Times correspondent and laughing at the “funny white robe” his onetime friend wore and his newly grown beard. “Man, he’s gone. He’s gone so far out he’s out completely.” With words he would later regret, the boxer added, “Nobody listens to that Malcolm anymore.

Another can do the activity for you; even enjoyment itself can be outsourced. The common example given by Žižek is the laugh track that occurs in most comedic sit-coms (now, sadly a dying form of entertainment with streaming services superseding network television), but the idea is that the television show is fully equipped with a canned laughter which then laughs at the point in the show when the actors make a funny remark. The point is not that the audience laughs along with the canned laughter, but that after a long day at work when you are tired, the canned laughter does the laughing for you. You are relieved of the need to act, and you imagine that there is a real person somewhere laughing at the joke in your place. Ideology functions in this gap, because the reality is that canned laughter is just a machine recording of laughter and there are no real people who are actually laughing. Žižek’s thesis is that this creates a “subject supposed to believe'' that there is someone out there doing the work that we are not doing. In instances when we give to charities we want to believe that the money is going to a good cause and that the problem of say, hunger in Africa, is being resolved by our donation. Not by the person donating the money, but by someone else who will allegedly act on our behalf and put in the work necessary for consumerism to continue unabated. Consumers can remain docile, or even active in their own hedonistic desires. Interpassivity implies that a decentered subject has emerged, where even the innermost desires of the subject can be externalized.

Ugandans were rated as the happiest people in East Africa, according to a recent UN report on happiness. The report concluded that it was not because of their physical circumstances, which were often adverse, but because of their outlook on life, and their appreciation of the little they have. There are many poor people in Uganda who don’t know where the next meal is coming from, but this does not stop them having fun or cracking a joke. Laughter is a big part of the society and, although there is often much to be sorrowful about in the harshness and rawness of life, people will generally see the funny side of things.

To be queer and Somali and neurodivergent is concentrated alchemy, and yet we constantly raid the cupboards of our souls like we are a people of lack. When you operate from a position of lack, you don’t realise you’re robbing yourself of everything worth preserving, and forgetting to toss away all the empty pursuits that lost their synthetic spell several generations ago. And suddenly, you’re wide awake in a new country, in a new decade, and you’re startled because you can’t remember how you got here or why you’re still feeling hunted by your own reflection. You can’t remember how or when or where or why you misplaced all your breezy dynamism—all that wildness of perception you used to project with such ferocity. Where did it all go? We have conveniently forgotten that we have always been fundamentally idiosyncratic and fantastic and fucking alive. Instead we feed ourselves and our children and our children’s children prosaic fuckery for what? Respectability politics? So that if we twist and try our damnedest to conform to standards that have never been coded into our collective DNA, that we’ll what? Somehow be less strange? Less weird and wonderful? That we’ll transcend the soul-snuffing snare that is the myth of the good immigrant? That if we mute all of our magic—everything that makes us some of the most innately interesting, individualistic and fun, funny beings in this boring, beige-as-fuck world—that we’ll win over whom? Folks who don’t season their food right or whose understanding of freedom is a shitty Friday night sloshfest at a shitty pub playing shitty music, chatting nonsense that no-one with a single iota of sense gives a fuck about? Is that who you are so deeply invested in trying to impress? If so, then go for it, but don’t fool yourself for a fucking second into thinking that trying desperately to shave off your elemental peculiarities through self-diminishment is salvation, because it simply isn’t, honey, and it never will be.

Being a christian in South Africa always keeps your faith in check. One minute you waiting for rapture or Jesus to come back. The next minute you are waiting for electricity to come back. Believe you me the wait on both feels the same.

I often get letters from people who say how they like the programs a lot, but I never give credit to the almighty power that created nature, to which I reply and say, "Well, it's funny that the people, when they say that this is evidence of the almighty, always quote beautiful things, they always quote orchids and hummingbirds and butterflies and roses." But I always have to think, too, of a little boy sitting on the banks of a river in west Africa who has a worm boring through his eyeball, turning him blind before he's five years old, and I reply and say, "Well, presumably the god you speak about created the worm as well," and now, I find that baffling to credit a merciful god with that action.

We’re all just a range of shades of brown, sometimes with a little bit of other colors mixed in, like pink and red. But people are funny about stuff like that. We all share the same ancestors, if you go back enough generations. We all come from Africa.

Buy yourself a ticket to Africa, anywhere there, doesn't matter. One way, naturally. Then just go-o-o.' He paused. 'Africa will sort you out. Make a man of you'.

THE YEAR OF MIRACLES, 1990 A young woman is on a plane coming from the Eastern Mediterranean, and is joined by a man who says, ‘Tell me what’s been happening in the world. I’ve been in the Himalayas for months, and I’ve not seen a newspaper nor heard the news. Thank God.’ ‘Well now, let me see’, says she. ‘The Soviet Union has given up communism, the Soviet colonies have given up the Soviet Union. The Berlin Wall is down and Germany is united. In South Africa they have given up apartheid.’ ‘Very funny’, says he, ‘and now tell me what has really happened.

He turned to his side, with the kind of creepily glazed look our eyeballs make when we’re alone in a room, brushing our teeth, chewing, or wiping our ass. His blanket was still wet with warm semen. He thought about his father. Then he remembered he needed to wash the clothes in the laundromat. His semen dripped and he thought about bird feeding. There was one bird who loved his safflower seeds. He ground his teeth and imagined what it was like to be born in Africa. He reflected on his most recent online English tutor lesson learning from a native speaker. He was fluent, but it paid to feel like you had a friend somewhere. Then he thought of peanut butter. The thoughts of the human mind transition so quickly that it only ever seems strange when we say it aloud to someone else. Otherwise, we’re all secretly freaks with our mouths shut. He laid there ugly.