Africa Is Beautiful Quotes

Most people write me off when they see me. They do not know my story. They say I am just an African. They judge me before they get to know me. What they do not know is The pride I have in the blood that runs through my veins; The pride I have in my rich culture and the history of my people; The pride I have in my strong family ties and the deep connection to my community; The pride I have in the African music, African art, and African dance; The pride I have in my name and the meaning behind it. Just as my name has meaning, I too will live my life with meaning. So you think I am nothing? Don’t worry about what I am now, For what I will be, I am gradually becoming. I will raise my head high wherever I go Because of my African pride, And nobody will take that away from me.

I marveled at the beauty of all life and savored the power and possibilities of my imagination. In these rare moments, I prayed, I danced, and I analyzed. I saw that life was good and bad, beautiful and ugly. I understood that I had to dwell on the good and beautiful in order to keep my imagination, sensitivity, and gratitude intact. I knew it would not be easy to maintain this perspective. I knew I would often twist and turn, bend and crack a little, but I also knew that…I would never completely break.

Whenever I felt like that, I would have a chat with my own Fat Mary. She was like the sweet fresh air after the rain. She brought me newness, clarity, and relief. She managed to get in touch with and resurrect the free spirit deep inside me. Being one with the spirit allowed me to soar above my everyday reality. I marveled at the beauty of all life and savored the power and possibilities of my imagination.

I was born in a place humans call central Africa, in a dense rain forest so beautiful, no crayons could ever do it justice.

I wanted to share with Black Americans the beautiful and empowering aspects of Africa.

My mother always wanted to live near the water," she said. "She said it's the one thing that brings us all together. That I can have my toe in the ocean off the coast of Maine, and a girl my age can have her toe in the ocean off the coast of Africa, and we would be touching. On opposite sides of the world.

I can worship Nature, and that fulfills my need for miracles and beauty. Art gives a spiritual depth to existence -- I can find worlds bigger and deeper than my own in music, paintings, and books. And from my friends and family I receive the highest benediction, emotional contact, and personal affirmation. I can bow before the works of Man, from buildings to babies, and that fulfills my need for wonder. I can believe in the sanctity of Life, and that becomes the Revealed Word, to live my life as I believe it should be, not as I'm told to by self-appointed guides.

I prayed that our growth would be as strong and determined as the seeds of coconut palms, boldly reaching skyward toward the sun diligently boring deeper into the earth to secure a firm foundation for the beautiful, durable, fruit-bearing trees they would become. For me, Mhonda was the place to continue the growth of the still young but strong roots of my tree planted in Kifungilo. This was my life now, the life I’d prayed for, the life that would provide me with an education and would open doors. I wanted this life very much. I told my wavering spirit to bear with me because, just like the coconut palm, I would sway and bend and bruise, but I would survive. I would have to become the tree in the African saying: ‘The tree that bends with the wind does not break.

If I had not grown up in Nigeria- and if all I knew of Africa were of popular images- I too would think that africa was a place of beautiful landscapes, beautiful animals and incomprehensible people fighting sensless wars, dying of poverty and aids- unable to speak for themselves and waiting to be saved by a kind white foreigner.

Mogadishu the beautiful - your white-turbaned mosques, baskets of anchovies as bright as mercury, jazz and shuffling feet, bird-boned servant girls with slow smiles, the blind white of your homes against the sapphire blue of the ocean - you are missed, her dreams seem to say.

My horizon lightened, I see an old woman. Who is she? Where is she from? Bent over, the ends of her boubou tied behind her, she empties into a plastic bag the left-overs of red rice. Her smiling face tells of the pleasant day she has just had. She wants to take back proof of this to her family, living perhaps in Ouakam, Thiaroye or Pikine. Standing upright, her eyes meeting my disapproving look, she mutters between teeth reddened by cola nuts: 'Lady, death is just as beautiful as life has been.

The world needs great inspires, who will encourage every living soul to reach their highest potential. You can be one.

To make a difference in the world, you don't have to be perfect, clever or beautiful. You just need to be kind.

The future of wildlife and the habitat that they depend on is being destroyed. It is time to make nature and all the beauty living within it our priority.

As Alan Paton said, 'Ah but your fucking land is beautiful'.

As I watched the pulsing fire among the trees and heard the beat of the drum merge and tremble with the voices, forming an intricate pattern of sound, I knew that someday I would have to return or be haunted forever by the beauty and mystery that is Africa.

History is ending because the dominator culture has led the human species into a blind alley, and as the inevitable chaostrophie approaches, people look for metaphors and answers. Every time a culture gets into trouble it casts itself back into the past looking for the last sane moment it ever knew. And the last sane moment we ever knew was on the plains of Africa 15,000 years ago rocked in the cradle of the Great Horned Mushroom Goddess before history, before standing armies, before slavery and property, before warfare and phonetic alphabets and monotheism, before, before, before. And this is where the future is taking us because the secret faith of the twentieth century is not modernism, the secret faith of the twentieth century is nostalgia for the archaic, nostalgia for the paleolithic, and that gives us body piercing, abstract expressionism, surrealism, jazz, rock-n-roll and catastrophe theory. The 20th century mind is nostalgic for the paradise that once existed on the mushroom dotted plains of Africa where the plant-human symbiosis occurred that pulled us out of the animal body and into the tool-using, culture-making, imagination-exploring creature that we are. And why does this matter? It matters because it shows that the way out is back and that the future is a forward escape into the past. This is what the psychedelic experience means. Its a doorway out of history and into the wiring under the board in eternity. And I tell you this because if the community understands what it is that holds it together the community will be better able to streamline itself for flight into hyperspace because what we need is a new myth, what we need is a new true story that tells us where we're going in the universe and that true story is that the ego is a product of pathology, and when psilocybin is regularly part of the human experience the ego is supressed and the supression of the ego means the defeat of the dominators, the materialists, the product peddlers. Psychedelics return us to the inner worth of the self, to the importance of the feeling of immediate experience - and nobody can sell that to you and nobody can buy it from you, so the dominator culture is not interested in the felt presence of immediate experience, but that's what holds the community together. And as we break out of the silly myths of science, and the infantile obsessions of the marketplace what we discover through the psychedelic experience is that in the body, IN THE BODY, there are Niagaras of beauty, alien beauty, alien dimensions that are part of the self, the richest part of life. I think of going to the grave without having a psychedelic experience like going to the grave without ever having sex. It means that you never figured out what it is all about. The mystery is in the body and the way the body works itself into nature. What the Archaic Revival means is shamanism, ecstacy, orgiastic sexuality, and the defeat of the three enemies of the people. And the three enemies of the people are hegemony, monogamy and monotony! And if you get them on the run you have the dominators sweating folks, because that means your getting it all reconnected, and getting it all reconnected means putting aside the idea of separateness and self-definition through thing-fetish. Getting it all connected means tapping into the Gaian mind, and the Gaian mind is what we're calling the psychedelic experience. Its an experience of the living fact of the entelechy of the planet. And without that experience we wander in a desert of bogus ideologies. But with that experience the compass of the self can be set, and that's the idea; figuring out how to reset the compass of the self through community, through ecstatic dance, through psychedelics, sexuality, intelligence, INTELLIGENCE. This is what we have to have to make the forward escape into hyperspace.

Everyone must be given the opportunity to think, read and write.

The future of wildlife and the habitat that they depend on is in being destroyed. It is time to make nature and all the beauty living within it our priority.

-Back there our sun doesn't speak. -Where's "there," Miss Marta? -Back there, in Europe. Here, it's different. Here, the sun moans, whispers, shouts. -Surely-I commented delicately-the sun is always the same. - You're wrong. There, the sun is a stone. Here it's a fruit.

Westerners arriving in Africa for the first time are always struck by its beauty and size--even the sky seems higher. And they often find themselves suddenly cracked open. They lose inhibitions, feel more alive, more themselves, and they begin to understand why, until then, they have only half lived. In Africa the essentials of existence--light, earth, water, food, birth, family, love, sickness, death--are more immediate, more intense. Visitors suddenly realize what life is for. To risk a huge generalization: [In the West], amid our wasteful wealth and time-pressed lives we have lost human values that still abound in Africa.

God created an awesome world. God intentionally loaded the world with amazing things to leave you astounded. The carefully air-conditioned termite mound in Africa, the tart crunchiness of an apple, the explosion of thunder, the beauty of an orchid, the interdependent systems of the human body, the inexhaustible pounding of the ocean waves, and thousands of other created sights, sounds, touches, and tastes—God designed all to be awesome. And he intended you to be daily amazed.

- Mr. Berg, Are you an Afrikaner? - Yes -And are you proud of it? -I am not ashamed of it, but I am not proud of it, for in fact I had nothing to do with it.

The beauty of Africa is not man made, it is natures gift to humanity.

In South Africa, they dig for diamonds. Tons of earth are moved to find a little pebble not as large as a little fingernail. The miners are looking for the diamonds, not the dirt. They are willing to lift all the dirt in order to find the jewels. In daily life, people forget this principle and become pessimists because there is more dirt than diamonds. When trouble comes, don’t be frightened by the negatives. Look for the positives and dig them out. They are so valuable it doesn't matter if you have to handle tons of dirt.

I believe that Human Kindness, Compassion and Caring towards all life, will always prevail. No matter how cruel the night, the dawn will break and Africa will still be here along with all its wild beauty.

Materialism has defeated feminism as well. In a sign of the times, Gloria Steinem was on the picket line when the first American DeBeers store opened on Fifth Avenue in June 2005, protesting the evictions of Bushmen in Botswana to make room for diamond miners and the charges that the company dealt in "blood diamonds" used to finance civil wars in Africa. Her presence meant nothing to young Hollywood beauties who are pleased to shill for the diamond industry in magazine layouts and personal appearances. As Steinem stood outside, Lindsay Lohan was inside the party, gushing over the possibility that she could get to wear one of the big rocks. Asked by reporters about the Bushmen controversy, she shrugged it off: "I don't get involved in any drama.

He feels a second pang now for the existence of perfection, the stubborn existence of perfection in the most vulnerable of things and in the face of his refusal-logical-admirable refusal-to engage with this existence in his heart, in his mind. For the comfortless logic, the curse of clear sight, no matter which string he pulls on the same wretched knot: (a) the futility of seeing given the fatality in a place such as this where a mother still bloody must bury her newborn, hose off, and go home to pound yam into paste; (b) the persistence of beauty, in fragility of all places!, in a dewdrop at daybreak, a thing that will end, and in moments, and in a garden, and in Ghana, lush Ghana, soft Ghana, verdant Ghana, where fragile things die.

A UN passport is the most beautiful thing that humanity has ever conceived. No colour, no affiliation, no religion, one planet, one world...In the document, only my name, date of birth and job appeared. Nothing else. Not the colour of my hair, or my country of origin. From now on my country was called Earth. I was a citizen of the world.

Sometimes I thought about my future, because Lynn said I should. She said it was hard to tell at this point, but someday, if I didn't go to Africa to study animals, I might be a beautiful genius tennis player. I didn't worry about it one way or another. I didn't care if I was a genius or if I was pretty or if I was good in sports. I just liked to listen to Lynn and to talk to Bera-Bera and to eat rice candies. The lady who used to live down the street could take all of her top teeth out of her mouth. She wasn't allowed to eat chewy candy. I could eat any kind of candy I wanted because I still had my baby teeth. If they rotted, I would simply grow more teeth. That was pretty great.

Lion, lion golden spun in savannahs of the sun, What immortal eye, or hand weaves beasts from dreams, sews sky to land?

The Rival If the moon smiled, she would resemble you. You leave the same impression Of something beautiful, but annihilating. Both of you are great light borrowers. Her O-mouth grieves at the world; yours is unaffected, And your first gift is making stone out of everything. I wake to a mausoleum; you are here, Ticking your fingers on the marble table, looking for cigarettes, Spiteful as a woman, but not so nervous, And dying to say something unanswerable. The moon, too, abuses her subjects, But in the daytime she is ridiculous. Your dissatisfactions, on the other hand, Arrive through the mailslot with loving regularity, White and blank, expansive as carbon monoxide. No day is safe from news of you, Walking about in Africa maybe, but thinking of me.

If the world allows the people of Darfur to be removed forever from their land and their way of life, then genocide will happen elsewhere because it will be seen as something that works. It must not be allowed to work. The people of Darfur need to go home now. I write this for them, and for that day, ... and for those still living who might yet have beautiful lives on the earth.

Mma Ramotswe had a gift for the American woman, a basket which on her return journey from Bulawayo she had bought, on impulse, from a woman sitting by the side of the road in Francistown. The woman was desperate, and Mma Ramotswe, who did not need a basket, had bought it to help her. It was a traditional Botswana basket, with a design worked into the weaving. "These little marks here are tears," she said. "The giraffe gives its tears to the women and they weave them into the basket." The American woman took the basket politely, in the proper Botswana way of receiving a gift with both hands. How rude were people who took a gift with one hand, as if snatching it from the donor; she knew better. You are very kind, Mma," she said. "But why did the giraffe give its tears?" Mma Ramotswe shrugged; she had never thought about it. "I suppose that it means that we can all give something," she said. "A giraffe has nothing else to give--only tears." Did it mean that? she wondered. And for a moment she imagined that she saw a giraffe peering down through the trees, its strange stilt-borne body among the leaves; and its moist velvet cheeks and liquid eyes; and she thought of all the beauty that there was in Africa, and of the laughter, and the love. The boy looked at the basket. "Is that true, Mma?" Mma Ramotswe smiled. "I hope so," she said.

Sometimes he wondered if Africa hadn’t been cursed for having too much beauty.

African leaders must desire to liberates it’s people through intensive education (formal and informal). The African people deserve to be educated.

It is not enough to believe. Believe must lead to change of attitude and conduct.

The glorious presence of God is with us. Let us rise in mighty strength to build the nation.

I sat amongst the bones for a while and watched the ocean as it churned, thinking that Africa was the most wild and devastatingly beautiful place that I would ever have the privilege of knowing.

Consider the genesis of a single-celled embryo produced by the fertilization of an egg by a sperm. The genetic material of this embryo comes from two sources: paternal genes (from sperm) and maternal genes (from eggs). But the cellular material of the embryo comes exclusively from the egg; the sperm is no more than a glorified delivery vehicle for male DNA—a genome equipped with a hyperactive tail. Aside from proteins, ribosomes, nutrients, and membranes, the egg also supplies the embryo with specialized structures called mitochondria. These mitochondria are the energy-producing factories of the cell; they are so anatomically discrete and so specialized in their function that cell biologists call them “organelles”—i.e., mini-organs resident within cells. Mitochondria, recall, carry a small, independent genome that resides within the mitochondrion itself—not in the cell’s nucleus, where the twenty-three pairs of chromosomes (and the 21,000-odd human genes) can be found. The exclusively female origin of all the mitochondria in an embryo has an important consequence. All humans—male or female—must have inherited their mitochondria from their mothers, who inherited their mitochondria from their mothers, and so forth, in an unbroken line of female ancestry stretching indefinitely into the past. (A woman also carries the mitochondrial genomes of all her future descendants in her cells; ironically, if there is such a thing as a “homunculus,” then it is exclusively female in origin—technically, a “femunculus”?) Now imagine an ancient tribe of two hundred women, each of whom bears one child. If the child happens to be a daughter, the woman dutifully passes her mitochondria to the next generation, and, through her daughter’s daughter, to a third generation. But if she has only a son and no daughter, the woman’s mitochondrial lineage wanders into a genetic blind alley and becomes extinct (since sperm do not pass their mitochondria to the embryo, sons cannot pass their mitochondrial genomes to their children). Over the course of the tribe’s evolution, tens of thousands of such mitochondrial lineages will land on lineal dead ends by chance, and be snuffed out. And here is the crux: if the founding population of a species is small enough, and if enough time has passed, the number of surviving maternal lineages will keep shrinking, and shrinking further, until only a few are left. If half of the two hundred women in our tribe have sons, and only sons, then one hundred mitochondrial lineages will dash against the glass pane of male-only heredity and vanish in the next generation. Another half will dead-end into male children in the second generation, and so forth. By the end of several generations, all the descendants of the tribe, male or female, might track their mitochondrial ancestry to just a few women. For modern humans, that number has reached one: each of us can trace our mitochondrial lineage to a single human female who existed in Africa about two hundred thousand years ago. She is the common mother of our species. We do not know what she looked like, although her closest modern-day relatives are women of the San tribe from Botswana or Namibia. I find the idea of such a founding mother endlessly mesmerizing. In human genetics, she is known by a beautiful name—Mitochondrial Eve.

Nala pushed her lithe body from the desk and swept across the room, her stilettos clicking against the tiled floor. Her movements were as fluid and elegant as the gazelles that inhabited the grassy savannas in Africa. She stood silently in front of the open window, the chiffon curtains floating in the breeze around her. She presented an ethereal vision, which held Abayomi spellbound. Beautiful on the outside. Lethal on the inside, he thought to himself.

Global women's issues like forced female circumcision, sex clubs in Thailand, the veiling of women in Africa, India, the Middle East, and Europe, the killing of female children in China, remain important concerns. However feminist women in the West are still struggling to decolonize feminist thinking and practice so that these issues can be addressed in a manner that does not reinscribe Western imperialism... A decolonized feminist perspective would first and foremost examine how sexist practices in relation to women's bodies globally are linked. For example: linking circumcision with life-threatening eating disorders (which are the direct consequence of a culture imposing thinness as a beauty ideal)...

Many things in this period have been hard to bear, or hard to take seriously. My own profession went into a protracted swoon during the Reagan-Bush-Thatcher decade, and shows scant sign of recovering a critical faculty—or indeed any faculty whatever, unless it is one of induced enthusiasm for a plausible consensus President. (We shall see whether it counts as progress for the same parrots to learn a new word.) And my own cohort, the left, shared in the general dispiriting move towards apolitical, atonal postmodernism. Regarding something magnificent, like the long-overdue and still endangered South African revolution (a jagged fit in the supposedly smooth pattern of axiomatic progress), one could see that Ariadne’s thread had a robust reddish tinge, and that potential citizens had not all deconstructed themselves into Xhosa, Zulu, Cape Coloured or ‘Eurocentric’; had in other words resisted the sectarian lesson that the masters of apartheid tried to teach them. Elsewhere, though, it seemed all at once as if competitive solipsism was the signifier of the ‘radical’; a stress on the salience not even of the individual, but of the trait, and from that atomization into the lump of the category. Surely one thing to be learned from the lapsed totalitarian system was the unwholesome relationship between the cult of the masses and the adoration of the supreme personality. Yet introspective voyaging seemed to coexist with dull group-think wherever one peered about among the formerly ‘committed’. Traditionally then, or tediously as some will think, I saw no reason to discard the Orwellian standard in considering modern literature. While a sort of etiolation, tricked out as playfulness, had its way among the non-judgemental, much good work was still done by those who weighed words as if they meant what they said. Some authors, indeed, stood by their works as if they had composed them in solitude and out of conviction. Of these, an encouraging number spoke for the ironic against the literal mind; for the generously interpreted interest of all against the renewal of what Orwell termed the ‘smelly little orthodoxies’—tribe and Faith, monotheist and polytheist, being most conspicuous among these new/old disfigurements. In the course of making a film about the decaffeinated hedonism of modern Los Angeles, I visited the house where Thomas Mann, in another time of torment, wrote Dr Faustus. My German friends were filling the streets of Munich and Berlin to combat the recrudescence of the same old shit as I read: This old, folkish layer survives in us all, and to speak as I really think, I do. not consider religion the most adequate means of keeping it under lock and key. For that, literature alone avails, humanistic science, the ideal of the free and beautiful human being. [italics mine] The path to this concept of enlightenment is not to be found in the pursuit of self-pity, or of self-love. Of course to be merely a political animal is to miss Mann’s point; while, as ever, to be an apolitical animal is to leave fellow-citizens at the mercy of Ideolo’. For the sake of argument, then, one must never let a euphemism or a false consolation pass uncontested. The truth seldom lies, but when it does lie it lies somewhere in between.

Death is 'where you run to when none of the principalities of your conscience will grant you asylum.' ....'In my world [(Africa)] death will come chasing. In your world [(the West)] it will start whispering in your ear to destroy yourself.' 'We must see all scars as beauty. Okay? ... A scar does not form on the dying. A scar means 'I survived' 'A sad story means, this storyteller is alive. The next thing you know, something fine will happen to her, something marvellous, and she will turn around and smile.

When he wasn't too sick to sit up, Roosevelt sought comfort and distraction in the world that he knew best: his library. For his trip to Africa, he had spent months choosing the books that he would take with him, ordering special volumes that had been beautifully bound in pigskin, with type reduced to the smallest legible size, so that the books would be as light as possible. Roosevelt, Kermit wrote, "read so rapidly that he had to plan very carefully in order to have enough books to last him through a trip.

The light irradiates white peaks of Annapurna marching down the sky, in the great rampart that spreads east and west for eighteen hundred miles, the Himalaya- the alaya (abode, or home) of hima (snow).Hibiscus, frangipani, bougainvillea: seen under snow peaks, these tropical blossoms become the flowers of heroic landscapes. Macaques scamper in green meadow, and a turquoise roller spins in a golden light. Drongos, rollers, barbets, and white Eqyptian vulture are the common birds, and all have close relatives in East Africa.

The globe-trotter lives in a smaller world than the peasent. He is always breathing an air of locality. London is a place to be compared to Chicage; Chicago is a place, to be compared to Timbuctoo. But Timbuctoo is not a place, sonce there, at least, live men who regard it as the universe, and breathe, not an air of locality, but the winds of the world. The man in the saloon steamer has seen all the races of men; and is thinking of the things that devide men - diet, dress, decorum, rings in the nose as in Africa, or in the ears as in Europe, blue paint among the ancients, or red paint among the modern Britons. The man in the cabbage field has seen nothing at all; but he is thinking of the things that unite men - hunger and babies, and the beauty of women, and the promise or menace of the sky.

A lizard, resting in the shade of the anthill, studied Atkinson with interest, tilting its head this way and that. Atkinson studied it in return. A small, dull brown animal, usually it would not catch Atkinson’s attention, but under the circumstances it became a thing of beauty.

This land of ours is a savage place,” she thought. “It is a land of fang and claw; of fishing spear and skinner’s knife; of blood and scalding suns. Yet it is a beautiful place nonetheless. There are places in the world that are more savage, I am sure, but there can be no place more beautiful.

She raises her hands to the sky and breathes it in, she starts spinning, enjoying the feel and energy of this Africa. She floats, her long skirt swaying with the dry grass in the breeze with her spirals, her sandaled feet covered in dust. She is part of Africa. She has never felt so free and happy.

Women with dark skin are sharing selfies on social media after decades of being underrepresented in the mainstream media. From what I have observed much of the dark skin adoration on social media appears to come from us - black women. We tend to use the appreciation hashtags with our own pictures of photographs of dark skin women whom we feel are stunning. While I am loving this fierceness.. There is just one sidetone to this revolution: I feel as if we are much more appreciated if we show more skin. The timelines are filled with absolutely beautiful dark-skinned women but most sadly most of the time they are all oiled up and showing their body parts in different angles. Now, I am definitely in to art and as a model I know that this comes with the territory. But we most not forget that we are Queens.. We need to stop degrading ourselves for likes on the gram. You don't have to be naked to show the world you're beautiful. You my sister are an African Queen. I feel as if black women are only appreciated if they wear very provocative clothes or if they do naked photoshoots. To me, it's degrading and reminds me of the time that we couldn't ride the bus because we were black. Women were seen as servants. The black women that weren't servants were sex slaves. We are not objects, we are not meat and people need to stop looking at us as sex objects. BUT we need to start respecting ourselves first! A black woman is a woman first and it should not even be necessary to specify the colour but this is the society we live in and I feel like I had to share this.

Contemplating while barefoot on the grounds my father and grandfather walked, I saw my life clearly. With African sun nibbling on my dark skin and gentle winds soothing my foreboding, my past life and current responsibilities overwhelmed me occasionally. Abundant tears flowed freely. Dripping on my face and clothes. Travelling through the ancient roads created by my forefathers, grasslands, trees and anthills kept me company. A lonely journey. I knew that nothing remains the same, but ones past never changes. Even in the loneliness of my past, I accepted that you cannot effectively go forward without knowing how and where you started your journey. Even in that state of near dejection I was aware that my sojourn in foreign lands is not forever, but my lording of this beautiful land, my own Africa, where my spent body will finally rest someday, is for eternity. Nothing remains the same, but nothing ever changes. It depends on how you look at your life.

Africa was full of people in need of help and there had to be a limit. You simply could not help everybody; but you could at least help those who came into your life. That principle allowed you to deal with the suffering you saw. That was your suffering. Other people would have to deal with the suffering that they, in their turn, came across.

Americans made beautiful, principled speeches and imposed countless conditions on all manner of things. But in the end, in Africa they seemed to move the ball very slowly. They regarded Africa not as a terrain of opportunity, or even as a morally compelling challenge to humanity, but as a burden, and largely as one to be evaded as much as possible.

147 The Rival If the moon smiled, she would resemble you. You leave the same impression Of something beautiful, but annihilating. Both of you are great light borrowers. Her O-mouth grieves at the world; yours is unaffected, And your first gift is making stone out of everything. I wake to a mausoleum; you are here, Ticking your fingers on the marble table, looking for cigarettes, Spiteful as a woman, but not so nervous, And dying to say something unanswerable. The moon, too, abases her subjects, But in the daytime she is ridiculous. Your dissatisfactions, on the other hand, Arrive through the mailslot with loving regularity, White and blank, expansive as carbon monoxide. No day is safe from news of you, Walking about in Africa maybe, but thinking of me.

As he was about to press the button to shut the doors, a young woman stepped in. She had that sort of beauty that deserved to be prosecuted for appearing without notice. Professor Khupe was confident that an appropriate law existed for such a purpose. However, no prosecutor could remain undistracted for long enough to find the said law in the criminal code. The young lady would enjoy a life of impunity.

Africa has been, through prejudice and ignorance, so sadly misrepresented, that anything like intelligence, industry, etc., is believed not to exist among its natives. But allow me to remark in the outset reader, that in our markets you may find beautiful silk and cotton goods manufactured by the more intelligent and ingenious among our people, we make our own saddles, cutlery, sword blades, javelins, and lances.

America’s patriotic song “America the Beautiful” invokes our spacious skies, our amber waves of grain, from sea to shining sea. Actually, that song reverses geographic realities. As in Africa, in the Americas the spread of native crops and domestic animals was slowed by constricted skies and environmental barriers. No waves of native grain ever stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast of North America, from Canada to Patagonia, or from Egypt to South Africa, while amber waves of wheat and barley came to stretch from the Atlantic to the Pacific across the spacious skies of Eurasia. That faster spread of Eurasian agriculture, compared with that of Native American and sub-Saharan African agriculture, played a role (as the next part of this book will show) in the more rapid diffusion of Eurasian writing, metallurgy, technology, and empires.

i'm looking for the face i had before the world was made. I was the primordial flaring forth, the gravitational waves, the whirling galaxies, and the exploding supernovas that would become stars and planets. I was the steaming planet Earth, the bacteria awash in the sea, and the early eukaryotes and multicellular animals. I exploded in the Cambrian explosion, stumbled onto land, walked with dinosaurs, saw trees and flowers appear, walked upright in Africa, and walked on the moon. I felt the embrace of gravity. I was one with all that had been and all that was to be. I experienced subjective mystical communion with the evolutionary, emergent universe. I was the universe. We know not where the journey leads, nor whether a final destination is even a meaningful concept. The attraction is the inherent thrill of participating in a grand creative endeavor for which participation is its own reward

The Job Application Esteemed gentlemen, I am a poor, young, unemployed person in the business field, my name is Wenzel, I am seeking a suitable position, and I take the liberty of asking you, nicely and politely, if perhaps in your airy, bright, amiable rooms such a position might be free. I know that your good firm is large, proud, old, and rich, thus I may yield to the pleasing supposition that a nice, easy, pretty little place would be available, into which, as into a kind of warm cubbyhole, I can slip. I am excellently suited, you should know, to occupy just such a modest haven, for my nature is altogether delicate, and I am essentially a quiet, polite, and dreamy child, who is made to feel cheerful by people thinking of him that he does not ask for much, and allowing him to take possession of a very, very small patch of existence, where he can be useful in his own way and thus feel at ease. A quiet, sweet, small place in the shade has always been the tender substance of all my dreams, and if now the illusions I have about you grow so intense as to make me hope that my dream, young and old, might be transformed into delicious, vivid reality, then you have, in me, the most zealous and most loyal servitor, who will take it as a matter of conscience to discharge precisely and punctually all his duties. Large and difficult tasks I cannot perform, and obligations of a far-ranging sort are too strenuous for my mind. I am not particularly clever, and first and foremost I do not like to strain my intelligence overmuch. I am a dreamer rather than a thinker, a zero rather than a force, dim rather than sharp. Assuredly there exists in your extensive institution, which I imagine to be overflowing with main and subsidiary functions and offices, work of the kind that one can do as in a dream? --I am, to put it frankly, a Chinese; that is to say, a person who deems everything small and modest to be beautiful and pleasing, and to whom all that is big and exacting is fearsome and horrid. I know only the need to feel at my ease, so that each day I can thank God for life's boon, with all its blessings. The passion to go far in the world is unknown to me. Africa with its deserts is to me not more foreign. Well, so now you know what sort of a person I am.--I write, as you see, a graceful and fluent hand, and you need not imagine me to be entirely without intelligence. My mind is clear, but it refuses to grasp things that are many, or too many by far, shunning them. I am sincere and honest, and I am aware that this signifies precious little in the world in which we live, so I shall be waiting, esteemed gentlemen, to see what it will be your pleasure to reply to your respectful servant, positively drowning in obedience. Wenzel

Weeping may stay for the night, but rejoicing comes in the morning” (Psalm 30:5) and “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28). I shared the divine assurance in Isaiah 61:3: Bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of joy instead of mourning, and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair. They will be called oaks of righteousness, a planting of the Lord for the display of his splendor.

Good evening," said the little prince courteously. "Good evening," said the snake. "What planet is this on which I have come down?" asked the little prince. "This is Earth; this is Africa," the snake answered. "Ah! Then there are no people eon the Earth?" "This is the desert. there are no people in the desert. The Earth is large," said the snake. the little prince sat down on a stone, and raised his eyes toward the sky. "I wonder," he said, "whether the stars are set alight in heaven so that one day each one of us may find his own again... Look at my planet. It is right there above us. But how far away it is! "It is beautiful," the snake said. "What has brought you here?" "I have been having some trouble with a flower," said the little prince. "Ah!" said the snake. And they were both silent. "Where are the men?" the little prince at last took up the conversation again. "It is a little lonely in the desert..." "it is also lonely among men," the snake said.

For modern humans, that number has reached one: each of us can trace our mitochondrial lineage to a single human female who existed in Africa about two hundred thousand years ago. She is the common mother of our species. We do not know what she looked like, although her closest modern-day relatives are women of the San tribe from Botswana or Namibia. I find the idea of such a founding mother endlessly mesmerizing. In human genetics, she is known by a beautiful name—Mitochondrial Eve.

Dante only made crazy people feel they could write great poetry. That was not true of course but then almost nothing was true and especially not in Africa. In Africa a thing is true at first light and a lie by noon and you have no more respect for it than for the lovely, perfect weed-fringed lake you see across the sun-baked salt plain. You have walked across that plain in the morning and you know that no such lake is there. But now it is there absolutely true, beautiful and believable.

Gaenor said that plus-size modeling was a new category, and she encouraged me to take it up, because I had the experience. Once again, I helped myself greatly in the long run by saying, “Why not?” My plus-size modeling career began with flying to Johannesburg to do TV commercials. As I was the only plus-size model in South Africa, I was soon traveling the country, doing print and runway shows while finishing my Master of Science degree. They needed one plus-size model and one older model, and I did both.

I like flowers because they are presentable, birds because they are musical, trees because they are natural, plants because they are beneficial, dogs because they are loyal, foxes because they are guileful, wolves because they are forceful, lions because they are royal, sharks because they are remarkable, crocodiles because they are formidable, bees because they are exceptional, spiders because they are artful, ants because they are responsible, chameleons because they are colorful, hawks because they are special, falcons because they are noble, owls because they are watchful, eagles because they are regal, streams because they are peaceful, rivers because they are predictable, lakes because they are crucial, oceans because they are beautiful, skies because they are delightful, stars because they are celestial, planets because they are spiritual, galaxies because they are incredible, winters because they are essential, summers because they are enjoyable, autumns because they are graceful, and springs because they are wonderful.

Truth is not a science. Virtue is not a faith. Love is not a religion. Courage is not a science. Hope is not a faith. Assurance is not a religion. Joy is not a science. Peace is not a faith. Compassion is not a religion. Humility is not a science. Patience is not a faith. Gratitude is not a religion. Silence is not a science. Harmony is not a faith. Goodness is not a religion. Grace is not a science. Elegance is not a faith. Beauty is not a religion. Prayer is not a science. Mediation is not a faith. God is not a religion.

Even in Africa, I had never seen such a profusion of stars as I saw on these clear nights on Pacific isles - not only big beaming planets and small single pinpricks... but also glittering clouds of them - the whole dome of the sky crowded with thick shapes formed from stars, overlaid with more shapes, a brilliant density, like a storm of light over a black depthless sea, made brighter still by twisting auroras composed of tiny star grains - points of light so fine and numerous they seemed like luminous vapor, the entire sky hung with veils of light like dazzling smoke... they made night in Oceania as vast and dramatic as day.

This naked embrace of earth and sky, the sun hard and strong overhead, pulling up moisture from the foliage, from soil, so that the swimming glisten of heat is like a caress made visible, this openness of air, everything visible for leagues, so that the circling hawk (the sun glancing off its wings) seems equipoised between sun and boulder -- this frank embrace between the lifting breast of the the land and the deep blue warmth of the sky is what exiles dream of; it is what they sicken for, now matter how hard they try to shut their minds against the memory of it... Living in town, Martha had forgotten this infinite exchange of earth and sky.

War and peace. There are blurred lines in the realities of both. A separation anxiety as the paradigm shifts from the air that a sniper wears on his face (real life, entertainment for the masses or the propaganda machine you decide), to the blueprint of an assassination in a driveway (Chris Hani lying in a pool of his own blood). You know that we cannot eat stones but we can burn, butcher, necklace, murder, forcibly remove and displace entire families, races of different faiths in the name of apartheid. Nelson Mandela, Steve Biko and Chris Hani instruments of change, war, tolerance or peace. The Romantics got it right before anyone else did. Truth is beauty. The truth is South Africa is not cool anymore.

(William) Hamilton recast the central ideas (of the evolutionary theory of aging) in mathematical form. Though this work tells us a good deal about why human lives take the course they do, Hamilton was a biologist whose great love was insects and their relatives, especially insects which make both our lives and an octopus’s life seem rather humdrum. Hamilton found mites in which the females hang suspended in the air with their swollen bodies packed with newly hatched young, and the males in the brood search out and copulate with their sisters there inside the mother. He found tiny beetles in which the males produce “and manhandle sperm cells longer than their whole bodies. Hamilton died in 2000, after catching malaria on a trip to Africa to investigate the origins of HIV. About a decade before his death, he wrote about how he would like his own burial to go. He wanted his body carried to the forests of Brazil and laid out to be eaten from the inside by an enormous winged Coprophanaeus beetle using his body to nurture its young, who would emerge from him and fly off. 'No worm for me nor sordid fly, I will buzz in the dusk like a huge bumble bee. I will be many, buzz even as a swarm of motorbikes, be borne, body by flying body out into the Brazilian wilderness beneath the stars, lofted under those beautiful and un-fused elytra [wing covers] which we will all hold over our “backs. So finally I too will shine like a violet ground beetle under a stone.

The Rival If the moon smiled, she would resemble you. You leave the same impression Of something beautiful, but annihilating. Both of you are great light borrowers. Her O-mouth grieves at the world; yours is unaffected, And your first gift is making stone out of everything. I wake to a mausoleum; you are here, Ticking your fingers on the marble table, looking for cigarettes, Spiteful as a woman, but not so nervous, And dying to say something unanswerable. The moon, too, abases her subjects, But in the daytime she is ridiculous. Your dissatisfactions, on the other hand, Arrive through the mailslot with loving regularity, White and blank, expansive as carbon monoxide. No day is safe from news of you, Walking about in Africa maybe, but thinking of me.

The great self-limitation practiced by man for ten centuries yielded, between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, the whole flower of the so-called "Renaissance." The root, usually, does not resemble the fruit in appearance, but there is an undeniable connection between the root's strength and juiciness and the beauty and taste of the fruit. The Middle Ages, it seems, have nothing in common with the Renaissance and are opposite to it in every way; nonetheless, all the abundance and ebullience of human energies during the Renaissance were based not at all on the supposedly "renascent" classical world, nor on the imitated Plato and Virgil, nor on manuscripts torn from the basements of old monasteries, but precisely on those monasteries, on those stern Franciscians and cruel Dominicans, on Saints Bonaventure, Anselm of Canterbury, and Bernard of Clairvaux. The Middle Ages were a great repository of human energies: in the medieval man's asceticism, self-abnegation, and contempt for his own beauty, his own energies, and his own mind, these energies, this heart, and this mind were stored up until the right time. The Renaissance was the epoch of the discovery of this trove: the thin layer of soil covering it was suddenly thrown aside, and to the amazement of following centuries dazzling, incalculable treasures glittered there; yesterday's pauper and wretched beggar, who only knew how to stand on crossroads and bellow psalms in an inharmonious voice, suddenly started to bloom with poetry, strength, beauty, and intelligence. Whence came all this? From the ancient world, which had exhausted its vital powers? From moldy parchments? But did Plato really write his dialogues with the same keen enjoyment with which Marsilio Ficino annotated them? And did the Romans, when reading the Greeks, really experience the same emotions as Petrarch, when, for ignorance of Greek, he could only move his precious manuscripts from place to place, kiss them now and then, and gaze sadly at their incomprehensible text? All these manuscripts, in convenient and accurate editions, lie before us too: why don't they lead us to a "renascence" among us? Why didn't the Greeks bring about a "renascence" in Rome? And why didn't Greco-Roman literature produce anything similar to the Italian Renaissance in Gaul and Africa from the second to the fourth century? The secret of the Renaissance of the fourteenth-fifteenth centuries does not lie in ancient literature: this literature was only the spade that threw the soil off the treasures buried underneath; the secret lies in the treasures themselves; in the fact that between the fourth and fourteenth centuries, under the influence of the strict ascetic ideal of mortifying the flesh and restraining the impulses of his spirit, man only stored up his energies and expended nothing. During this great thousand-year silence his soul matured for The Divine Comedy; during this forced closing of eyes to the world - an interesting, albeit sinful world-Galileo was maturing, Copernicus, and the school of careful experimentation founded by Bacon; during the struggle with the Moors the talents of Velasquez and Murillo were forged; and in the prayers of the thousand years leading up to the sixteenth century the Madonna images of that century were drawn, images to which we are able to pray but which no one is able to imitate. ("On Symbolists And Decadents")

On the contrary, Bernier wrote, he had encountered black women who were among the most beautiful in the world: What I have observed as regards the beauty of women is no less differentiated. Certainly, there are lovely ones, ugly ones to be found everywhere. I have seen some real beauties in Egypt, which put me in mind of the fair and famed Cleopatra. Among the Blacks of Africa I have also seen some very beautiful women who did not have thick lips and snub noses. I have encountered seven or eight in various places who were of such an astonishing beauty that they put in the shade the Venus of the Palazzo Farnese in Rome—with aquiline nose, small mouth, coral lips, ivory teeth, large bright eyes, gentle features and a bosom and everything else of utter perfection. At Moka, I saw several of them completely naked, waiting to be sold, and I can tell you, there could be nothing lovelier in the world to see.29

On a hike in East Africa 2 million years ago, you might well have encountered a familiar cast of human characters: anxious mothers cuddling their babies and clutches of carefree children playing in the mud; temperamental youths chafing against the dictates of society and weary elders who just wanted to be left in peace; chest-thumping machos trying to impress the local beauty and wise old matriarchs who had already seen it all. These archaic humans loved, played, formed close friendships and competed for status and power – but so did chimpanzees, baboons and elephants. There was nothing special about humans. Nobody, least of all humans themselves, had any inkling that their descendants would one day walk on the moon, split the atom, fathom the genetic code and write history books. The most important thing to know about prehistoric humans is that they were insignificant animals with no more impact on their environment than gorillas, fireflies or jellyfish.

In 1955 flying was much more dangerous than it is now, but there was a party atmosphere aboard long flights and everyone enjoyed the ever-flowing drinks and food. Smoking was the norm and it didn’t take long before the cabin was full of smoke. The stewardesses were friendly and I can remember some that were very friendly. I don’t remember much about my time in Lisbon because, before I knew it, we were in the air again heading south across the ocean to the vastness of the North African desert. The light yellow sand under us in Morocco and the Spanish Sahara was endless. The fine sand went from the barren coastal surf and endless miles of beautiful beaches, inland as far as the eye could see. After a time I saw what I believed, at the time, to be a radio relay station located out on a desolate sand spit near Villa Bens. It was only later that I found out that it was Castelo de Tarfaya, a small fortification on the North African coast. Tarfaya was occupied by the British in 1882, when they established a trading post called Casa del Mar. This forgotten part of the world is now in the southern part of Morocco.

Social life was similarly affected by the teachings of the Koran. At a time when in Christian Europe an epidemic was regarded as a scourge of God to which man had but to submit meekly - at that time, and long before it, the Muslims followed the injunction of their Prophet which directed them to combat epidemics by segregating the infected towns and areas. And at a time when even the kings and nobles of Christendom regarding bathing as an almost indecent luxury, even the poorest of Muslim houses had at least one bathroom, while elaborate public baths were common in every Muslim city (in the ninth century, for instance, Córdoba had three hundred of them): and all this in response to the Prophet’s teaching that ‘Cleanliness is part of faith’. A Muslim did not come into conflict with the claims of spiritual life if he took pleasure in the beautiful things of material life, for, according to the Prophet, ‘God loves to see on His servants an evidence of His bounty’. In short, Islam gave a tremendous incentive to cultural achievements which constitute one of the proudest pages in the history of mankind; and it gave this incentive by saying Yes to the intellect and No to obscurantism, Yes to action and no to quietism, Yes to life and No to ascetism. Little wonder, then, that as soon as it emerged beyond the confines of Arabia, Islam won new adherents by leaps and bounds. Born and nurtured in the world-contempt of Pauline and Augustinian Christianity, the populations of Syria and North Africa, and a little layer of Visigothic Spain, saw themselves suddenly confronted with a teaching which denied the dogma of Original Sin and stressed the inborn dignity of earthly life: and so they rallied in ever-increasing numbers to the new creed that gave them to understand that man was God’s vicar on earth. This, and not a legendary ‘conversion at the point of the sword’, was the explanation of Islam’s amazing triumph in the glorious morning of its history. It was not the Muslims that had made Islam great: it was Islam that had made the Muslims great. But as soon as their faith became habit and ceased to be a programme of life, to be consciously pursued, the creative impulse that underlay their civilisation waned and gradually gave way to indolence, sterility and cultural decay.

Blocks of flats could change everything, thought Mma Ramotswe. They were designed for people, but people were not necessarily designed for them. These flats at the edges of the Village, though, were made more human by the washing that was hung out to dry from their balconies; by the children who congregated in their doorways, or played with skipping ropes and dogs on their pathways; by the music that the residents listened to, melodies that drifted out of the open windows and throbbed with life. All of this made it harder for large new buildings to deaden the human spirit. It was like the bush: you could clear it and build something where once there had been nothing but trees and grass and termite mounds, but if you turned your back for a moment, Africa would begin to reclaim what had always been hers. The grass would encroach, its seeds carried by the wind; birds would drop the seeds of saplings that would then send tiny shoots up out of the ground; the termites would marshal their exploratory troops to begin rebuilding their own intricate cities of mud in the very places they had claimed once before. And sooner or later the bush would have covered all your efforts and it would be as it was before, the wound on nature completely healed.

I love Africa....... Each day each breath, she consumes me. I have never changed so much In such a short time Each day I feel more part of her. Her colour, smell, her smiles , the ever changing landscapes. Vast deserts rolling hills plaines & Mountains. Her beauty and her majesty. Like sweet wine flowing through my veins, my heart sings as I wave to all those faces going by. Back home to my Grandmothers Birth place. They said “welcome home”, those village boys. How did they know? You all said I would cry, I thought no, but yes I often do. Not for their pain but for their happiness . I cry now, together hearts will sing ,” I love Africa”. See her now as I write.. Kilimanjaro , it doesn’t get much better .Tears on a hard mans face. There is no time but now , no words just peace. Thousands of smiling faces, the mass of souls are singing out . Yes I see and feel it now.... In those trees I sense the Spirits of our saving , could it be our looking for? Sailing ships a familiar shore, now I’m crying happy and singing . Thoughts intense of please no more. I love Africa. An epiphany I can’t explain .Not like the ancient rituals , sound of rain, and men together by campfires. Beginning to end but there really is no such thing as time, just imaginings. We still love sitting by the camp fire and we love listening to the rain? I love Africa the Eden and our Birthplace , Man. How can I explain to you my friend what I have seen and felt unless you too have seen it all ... Africa. Michael Burke.

We will always be black, you and I, even if it means different things in different places. France is built on its own dream, on its collection of bodies, and recall that your very name is drawn from a man who opposed France and its national project of theft by colonization. It is true that our color was not our distinguishing feature there, so much as the Americanness represented in our poor handle on French. And it is true that there is something particular about how the Americans who think they are white regard us—something sexual and obscene. We were not enslaved in France. We are not their particular “problem,” nor their national guilt. We are not their niggers. If there is any comfort in this, it is not the kind that I would encourage you to indulge. Remember your name. Remember that you and I are brothers, are the children of trans-Atlantic rape. Remember the broader consciousness that comes with that. Remember that this consciousness can never ultimately be racial; it must be cosmic. Remember the Roma you saw begging with their children in the street, and the venom with which they were addressed. Remember the Algerian cab driver, speaking openly of his hatred of Paris, then looking at your mother and me and insisting that we were all united under Africa. Remember the rumbling we all felt under the beauty of Paris, as though the city had been built in abeyance of Pompeii. Remember the feeling that the great public gardens, the long lunches, might all be undone by a physics, cousin to our rules and the reckoning of our own country, that we do not fully comprehend.

Linnaeus divided the genus Homo into two species, Homo sapiens (man) and Homo troglodytes (ape), and divided Homo sapiens into four natural varieties—H. sapiens americanus, H. sapiens europaeus, H. sapiens asiaticus, and H. sapiens afer—linked to the four known regions of the world, America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. He color-coded the subspecies red, white, yellow, and black and assigned each a set of physical, personality, cultural, and social traits. Linnaeus was influenced by the classical concept of the Great Chain of Being described by Saint Thomas Aquinas, which placed everything in the universe—from stones to angels—in a grand hierarchy established by God. At the pinnacle of beauty and intelligence Linnaeus placed H. sapiens europaeus: “Vigorous, muscular. Flowing blond hair. Blue eyes. Very smart, inventive. Covered by tight clothing. Ruled by law.” H. sapiens americanus, according to Linnaeus, was “Ill-tempered, impassive. Thick straight black hair; wide nostrils; harsh face; beardless. Stubborn, contented, free. Paints himself with red lines. Ruled by custom.” Linnaeus described H. sapiens asiaticus as “Melancholy, stern. Black hair; dark eyes. Strict, haughty, greedy. Covered by loose garments. Ruled by opinion.” And at the bottom, he placed H. sapiens afer: “Sluggish, lazy. Black kinky hair; silky skin; flat nose; thick lips; females with genital flap and elongated breasts. Crafty, slow, careless. Covered by grease. Ruled by caprice.” Here lies the origin of the color scheme for mankind American children still sing about in Sunday school: red, yellow, black, and white.

So when people ask you where you're from, you won't have a one-word answer for them. Some people, the kind who use cosmopolitan and migrant as insults, will call you rootless. They will call you inauthentic. They will tell you that you lack some important anchor to the earth, that your loves and attachments have less force than theirs because of all the journeys in our family's past. When they say such things, remind yourself that they, too, are migrants, even if they've forgotten it. The human story is one of continual branching movement, out of Africa to every corner of the globe. When people talk of blood and soil, as if their ancestors had sprung fully formed from the earth of a particular place, it involves a kind of forgetting. Place is not nothing, and you need to understand that many families have histories that are unlike ours. There is something noble about staying put and building, something worthy of respect. Buy there is also something noble about the nomad who carries a whole world in a suitcase. You were born here in New York, int he middle of a February snowstorm, and so this city will always be yours. Perhaps, if we move again to one of the other places whose names your mother and I have murmured to each other across the kitchen table, you may not grow up thinking of it as home. I'm writing to tell you that you don't need to worry about this. It's not a loss or a lack. Your experience is no more or less authentic or beautiful than a person who lives on land their ancestors have farmed for generations. It is different. You can learn from such people. And they can learn from you.

In the second week, more people appeared. Esme met a missionary couple returning to a place called Wells-next-the-Sea. ‘It’s next to the sea,’ the lady said, and Esme smiled and thought she must remember that, to tell Kitty later. She saw them both glance at the black band round her arm, then look away. They told her about the huge beach that stretched out below the town and how Norfolk was full of houses made of pebbles. They had never been to Scotland, they said, but they had heard it was very beautiful. They bought her some lemonade and sat with her on deck-chairs while she drank it. ‘My baby brother,’ Esme found herself saying, as she swirled the ice in the bottom of the glass, ‘died of typhoid.’ The lady put her hand to her throat, then rested it on Esme’s arm. She said she was very sorry. Esme didn’t mention that her ayah had also died, or that they had buried Hugo in the churchyard in the village and that this bothered her, that he was being left behind in India while they all went to Scotland, or that her mother hadn’t spoken to her or looked at her since. ‘I didn’t die,’ Esme said, because this still puzzled her, still kept her awake in her narrow bunk. ‘Even though I was there.’ The man cleared his throat. He gazed out to the lumped, greenish line of what he’d told Esme was the coast of Africa. ‘You will have been spared,’ he said, ‘for a purpose. A special purpose.’ Esme looked up from her empty glass and studied his face in wonder. A purpose. She had a special purpose ahead of her. His dog-collar was startling white against the brown of his neck, his mouth set in a serious downturn. He said he would pray for her.

They watched the turning colors of the sky until they faded to gray. 'Are the sunsets in Africa as beautiful?' Felicity asked. He stirred. 'Hm? Oh. They're different. The heat rises from the ground in waves.' He motioned with his hand. 'The lower the sun gets, the more the horizon seems to ripple and move, like it's alive. It's mesmerizing.' She freed her fingers and started back toward the house. 'I'm sorry all Cheshire sunsets have to offer are pretty colors.' Rafe watched her retreating backside, tired of the tension between them, and tired of the way he couldn't mention anything farther away than Pelford without upsetting her - even when she lured him into the conversation, as though to test his interest. 'Lis, stop that.' She turned and looked at him. 'Then stop preferring everywhere else in the world above Forton Hall.' He narrowed his eyes. 'I will, if you'll stop preferring Forton Hall above all the rest of damned creation.

I began to tell the Lord how beautiful His creation was. Of course He was already aware of that, so I described how marvelous were the works of His hands and how utterly fantastic it was that each tiny snowflake was different. I described how wonderful the colors of the rainbow were and how they represented His covenant with man. The Lord was patient and allowed me to carry on in this fashion for several minutes, but alas, I was not really able to accurately answer His simple request. Then He spoke to me and gave me the revelation to what I was seeing. The Lord said, “My son, what you are seeing are the souls of unsaved men and women of earth who are dying and going to hell at this very moment.” Those words penetrated my spirit like a sharp two-edged sword. I fell to my knees and began to weep as a passion that I had never known began to well up from some mysterious and hidden place deep within my spirit. “Oh, God, look at all of those souls,” I said, breaking the silence. Suddenly, I was overwhelmed with a strange compulsion to watch for a long time as thousands upon thousands of tiny flakes fell through the bright sunbeam. Their short fall was full of spectacular color and glory, but when they hit the ground, it was all over. The Lord was revealing to me a prophetic picture of the brevity of our short lives on an eternal scale. Our days on earth are but a vapor! (See Psalm 39:5 and James 4:14.) I was pierced through to the very heart. “Lord!” I cried out. “What can I possibly do?” He replied, “Just do what I ask, and preach the Cross of Christ.” “I can do that Lord. I will do that, my God, but I will need Your help.” I stayed upon my knees for a long time gazing at this spectacle. During this encounter, God birthed within me a holy passion and hunger to witness souls saved and people totally healed and delivered. I was absorbed in witnessing the array of tiny cascades of colors that luxuriated in the glory of God. I contemplated the ramifications of what I had been told. What a beautiful and glorious God He is. How can we as humankind turn our backs upon Him and such a great salvation that is so easily ours? I pondered all of the events that had been unfolding over the past few days, realizing that I would never be the same. I also realized that God would have to bring all the things that He had birthed in my heart to pass. I purposed to surrender my life and destiny to His will, and to Him. I “altared” my destiny into the hands of God. It was also during this encounter that the Lord instructed me to travel to Africa as an “armor bearer,” to preach His Gospel there and to pray for the sick. I was actually terrified by the prospect of traveling to Africa. I couldn’t imagine that in reality I could go there, considering my current financial situation and my lack of training to preach or minister in healing. However, I soon learned that with God nothing is impossible. Perhaps my obedience to walk with God in minus 12 degree temperatures opened the door to Africa to me? It was still another seemingly bizarre and peculiar gesture of obedience to the Spirit of God. ENTERTAINING ANGELS IN AMERICA After my return to the United States from Canada, I was radically transformed. I could no longer settle for a form of godliness. I began to wait on God, and He began to release supernatural provision

The Lone Star of Africa Land of the free, on your beach and sacred forests loves flourished. You, Liberia, you my love to echo, the scream of freedom, holding tight and will never let go. O beautiful land, The Lone star for decades has survived wars and tribalism the elders who keep the ancestral treasures that resulted in Vandalism. When will morning break for great leaders to stand for what is right Mother Liberia?

Jewel Hyun, a Korean American woman, became engaged in global ministry later in life. She enjoyed meeting with me as she prepared for ministry trips, during which she would speak in other countries at conferences. On one occasion she was preparing for a trip to East Africa, where she would be speaking to women who had suffered displacement as refugees as the result of an ethnic genocide. She was concerned about how she could "connect" with these women who lived in such a different world. If you just met jewel, who looks very distinguished, you would never know that her childhood years included fleeing from North Korea and living with her family as refugees. I knew her story, so I responded, "Tell them your own story." "Why would they want to hear my story?" she replied. "Because when these women look at you, they will think to themselves, `This is a nice lady with beautiful clothes and manicured fingernails. She's nice, but she has no idea of the life we've lived.' When you tell them your story, you will be a living representative of hope for them." Jewel told me later that her story connected her deeply to the women, as they realized that she too had shared in the fellowship of suffering.

From the Bridge” by Captain Hank Bracker Behind “The Exciting Story of Cuba” It was on a rainy evening in January of 2013, after Captain Hank and his wife Ursula returned by ship from a cruise in the Mediterranean, that Captain Hank was pondering on how to market his book, Seawater One. Some years prior he had published the book “Suppressed I Rise.” But lacking a good marketing plan the book floundered. Locally it was well received and the newspapers gave it great reviews, but Ursula was battling allergies and, unfortunately, the timing was off, as was the economy. Captain Hank has the ability to see sunshine when it’s raining and he’s not one easily deterred. Perhaps the timing was off for a novel or a textbook, like the Scramble Book he wrote years before computers made the scene. The history of West Africa was an option, however such a book would have limited public interest and besides, he had written a section regarding this topic for the second Seawater book. No, what he was embarking on would have to be steeped in history and be intertwined with true-life adventures that people could identify with. Out of the blue, his friend Jorge suggested that he write about Cuba. “You were there prior to the Revolution when Fidel Castro was in jail,” he ventured. Laughing, Captain Hank told a story of Mardi Gras in Havana. “Half of the Miami Police Department was there and the Coca-Cola cost more than the rum. Havana was one hell of a place!” Hank said. “I’ll tell you what I could do. I could write a pamphlet about the history of the island. It doesn’t have to be very long… 25 to 30 pages would do it.” His idea was to test the waters for public interest and then later add it to his book Seawater One. Writing is a passion surpassed only by his love for telling stories. It is true that Captain Hank had visited Cuba prior to the Revolution, but back then he was interested more in the beauty of the Latino girls than the history or politics of the country. “You don’t have to be Greek to appreciate Greek history,” Hank once said. “History is not owned solely by historians. It is a part of everyone’s heritage.” And so it was that he started to write about Cuba. When asked about why he wasn’t footnoting his work, he replied that the pamphlet, which grew into a book over 600 pages long, was a book for the people. “I’m not writing this to be a history book or an academic paper. I’m writing this book, so that by knowing Cuba’s past, people would understand it’s present.” He added that unless you lived it, you got it from somewhere else anyway, and footnoting just identifies where it came from. Aside from having been a ship’s captain and harbor pilot, Captain Hank was a high school math and science teacher and was once awarded the status of “Teacher of the Month” by the Connecticut State Board of Education. He has done extensive graduate work, was a union leader and the attendance officer at a vocational technical school. He was also an officer in the Naval Reserve and an officer in the U.S. Army for a total of over 40 years. He once said that “Life is to be lived,” and he certainly has. Active with Military Intelligence he returned to Europe, and when I asked what he did there, he jokingly said that if he had told me he would have to kill me. The Exciting Story of Cuba has the exhilaration of a novel. It is packed full of interesting details and, with the normalizing of the United States and Cuba, it belongs on everyone’s bookshelf, or at least in the bathroom if that’s where you do your reading. Captain Hank is not someone you can hold down and after having read a Proof Copy I know that it will be universally received as the book to go to, if you want to know anything about Cuba! Excerpts from a conversation with Chief Warrant Officer Peter Rommel, USA Retired, Military Intelligence Corps, Winter of 2014.

It was a good thing to be an African. There were terrible things that happened in Africa, things that brought shame and despair when one thought about them, but that was not all there was in Africa. However great the suffering of the people of Africa, however harrowing the cruelty and chaos brought about by soldiers—small boys with guns, really—there was still so much in Africa from which one could take real pride. There was the kindness, for example, and the ability to smile, and the art and the music.

The ordinary people of Africa tended not to have room in their hearts for hatred. They were sometimes foolish, like people anywhere, but they did not bear grudges, as Mr Mandela had shown the world.

A friend of mine once saw Mandela in a South African airport and told me this story. The president had noticed a lady who was walking by with her daughter, a beautiful five- or six-year-old girl, with blond hair and blue eyes. Mandela walked up to this little girl and leaned down and shook her hand, and he said, “Do you know who I am?” And the child smiled and said, “Yes, you are President Mandela.” Mandela said, “Yes, I am your president. And if you work very hard in school and you learn a lot and you are nice to everybody, you too could grow up to be President of South Africa.” Just

The idea of putting Magisterial teaching in a beautiful display case while separating it from pastoral practice, which then could evolve along with circumstances, fashions, and passions, is a sort of heresy, a dangerous schizophrenic pathology. I therefore solemnly state that the Church in Africa is staunchly opposed to any rebellion against the teaching of Jesus and of the Magisterium. . . . The Church of Africa is committed in the name of the Lord Jesus to keeping unchanged the teaching of God and of the Church.

Everybody must be given the opportunity for self liberation and development.

I used to be. Have you ever been to Africa?” “No,” I replied. I had only been out of the country once, and that was when Drew took me for our anniversary. “You tell that boy I said to take you there, beautiful country,” he assured me.

Africa will get nowhere until we have mechanics... Mechanics are the first stone in the building. Then there are other people on top. Doctors. Nurses. Teachers. But the whole thing is built on mechanics. That is why it is important to teach young people to be mechanics.

The Afrikaner's fear is compounded by his unique position in the white world. He is a creature of the beauty and the ugliness of South Africa, while he is a white man, his psyche has been affected profoundly by the African.

I saw an even more egregious example of this a few years later. I had moved to Edmonton to finish my undergraduate degree. I took an apartment with my sister, who was studying to be a nurse. She was also an up-and-out-of-there person. (Not too many years later she would plant strawberries in Norway and run safaris through Africa and smuggle trucks across the Tuareg-menaced Sahara Desert, and babysit orphan gorillas in the Congo.) We had a nice place in a new high-rise, overlooking the broad valley of the North Saskatchewan River. We had a view of the city skyline in the background. I bought a beautiful new Yamaha upright piano, in a fit of enthusiasm. The place looked good

Rhythm came from Africa. We need 2 stop frontin' about that. Rhythm and heartbeats.

Just the daily experience of walking down the halls proved liberating. Young women from Africa came to school wearing floor- length skirts in bright orange or hot pink, with contrasting head scarves in electric blue. Their counterparts from Southeast Asia showed up wearing hijabs adorned with sequins. Young men from Southeast Asia sometimes wore stripes of yellow paint on their cheeks as a form of blessing. Female students from the Middle East did their hair in elaborate updos and then draped wool scarves over their big coiffures, but wore jeans and American T- shirts. One day, I saw an Iraqi student wearing a black head scarf and a gray T- shirt that said I KNOW THAT GUAC IS EXTRA. You could be anything at all and register as gorgeous— you knew this, if you walked the hallways of this school. It was a place that eroded prejudices and expanded ideas of beauty.

My dream, thus mission in life is to travel the world and photograph beautiful, vibrant animals in all places and circumstances, free and confined”. Julian Starks