Africa Motherland Quotes

You can no longer see or identify yourself solely as a member of a tribe, but as a citizen of a nation of one people working toward a common purpose.

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.

You can’t hate the roots of the tree without ending up hating the tree. You can’t hate your origin without ending up hating yourself. You can’t hate the land, your motherland, the place that you come from, and we can’t hate Africa without ending up hating ourselves. The Black man in the Western Hemisphere—North America, Central America, South America, and in the Caribbean—is the best example of how one can be made, skillfully, to hate himself that you can find anywhere on this earth.

Africa! Africa! Africa! Africa my motherland! Africa, your people cries for you! Africans must educate their citizens. Africans must reach out to it's people and empower them to build the nation. Africans you are the only people who can liberated your citizens from poverty through education. Africans must pay the price to rebuild the continent.

I have forsaken her for a place I will never belong, but will always remain under her spell, forever to be, a child of my motherland.

It is not enough to say, simply, the motherland called and we fought; woe to the dead, and to the living goes their glory.

Two whole continents, North America and Australia, had been made virtually as white in blood as the European motherland; two other continents, South America and Africa, had been extensively colonized by white stocks; while even huge Asia had seen its empty northern march, Siberia, pre-empted for the white man’s abode. Even where white populations had not locked themselves to the soil few regions of the earth had escaped the white man’s imperial sway, and vast areas inhabited by uncounted myriads of dusky folk obeyed the white man’s will. Beside

We command peace and order in the motherland in the mighty name of Jesus. South Africa belongs to God. South Africa and her people are loved and protected by Jehovah and they will be called blessed in the mighty name of Jesus. Amen.

Jane asked a guide how the bridge got its name and had tears in her eyes when she learnt that it was where enslaved Africans would commit suicide to escape the horrors of slavery. With no land between the bridge and Africa, the hope was that the raging current would carry them home to their motherland.

Never forsake your motherland.

I hadn’t been expecting to fit right in, obviously, but I think I arrived there naively believing I’d feel some visceral connection to the continent I’d grown up thinking of as a sort of mythic motherland, as if going there would bestow on me some feeling of completeness. But Africa, of course, owed us nothing. It’s a curious thing to realize, the in-betweenness one feels being African American in Africa. It gave me a hard-to-explain feeling of sadness, a sense of being unrooted in both lands.

Our culinary memory is short and we live in a very different food world now. Chances are you won’t remember the late nineties as a time when restaurants were basically inaccessible to most Americans, but it was. Our dining culture was, by and large, bifurcated. On one side, you had prohibitively expensive, mostly French-inspired restaurants with excellent service and comfortable dining rooms. On the other, there were far more affordable options serving the cuisines of Asia, Africa, and Latin America in humble settings—a genre that’s been lumped together as “ethnic food” since the 1960s. But as delicious as those places could be, they were usually locked into the traditions and time periods from which their immigrant proprietors first came. There really wasn’t a place where you could find something in between: innovative cuisine that was neither married to France nor fixed to the recipes of the motherland, made with high-quality ingredients, and available for, say, twenty bucks. I could tell that race played a major role in America’s slow uptake on this concept, which only made it more personal for me.* 9

I moved with the awkwardness of a tourist, aware that we were outsiders, even with our black skin. People sometimes stared at us on the street. I hadn’t been expecting to fit right in, obviously, but I think I arrived there naively believing I’d feel some visceral connection to the continent I’d grown up thinking of as a sort of mythic motherland, as if going there would bestow on me some feeling of completeness. But Africa, of course, owed us nothing. It’s a curious thing to realize, the in-betweeness one feels being African American in Africa. It gave me a hard-to-explain feeling of sadness, a sense of being unrooted in both lands.

I moved with the awkwardness of a tourist, aware that we were outsiders, even with our black skin. People sometimes stared at us on the street. I hadn’t been expecting to fit right in, obviously, but I think I arrived there naively believing I’d feel some visceral connection to the continent I’d grown up thinking of as a sort of mythic motherland, as if going there would bestow on me some feeling of completeness. But Africa, of course, owed us nothing. It’s a curious thing to realize, the in-betweenness one feels being African American in Africa. It gave me a hard-to-explain feeling of sadness, a sense of being unrooted in both lands.

I have seen disparaging comments on social media toward my fellow African American and Afro-Caribbean people throughout the diaspora. People saying things like, “they’re wearing beauty shop dashikis” or “they’re grasping at straws because they don’t know anything about Africa.” Listen, we get our healing the way we need to. And if I put on a beauty shop dashiki, it’s because that is what I have access to. And I will rock it—proudly—and be connected to my motherland and my Source in the way that my womb energy tells me is connective for me.

I spoke once at Cambridge University in England and among other things I said, “Now the boycott of South African goods is lifted.” After my address a middle-aged woman accosted me and said, “Archbishop, I hear you and cerebrally I agree with you. But my parents brought me up to boycott South African goods and I have brought up my children to boycott South African goods too. So even now, when I buy South African goods I am furtive because all of me says I am doing something wrong.” I doubt that any other cause has evoked the same passion and dedication as the anti-apartheid cause and I doubt that any other country has been prayed for by so many people so intensely and for so long as has my motherland. In a sense, if a miracle had to happen anywhere, then South Africa would have been the obvious candidate.